The Pittsburgh Study: Child Health Equity Project

The WPRDC team has been collaborating with The Pittsburgh Study, a partnership of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Study is a Community-partnered research and advocacy initiative focused on child health equity that strives to ensure that every child in our region is healthy, thriving, and achieving their academic goals. Our collaboration involves

• The development of a community indicators tool for sharing community-level data related to child health and data collection activities. The site provides policymakers and community members with a wide range of contextual data about community conditions that can inform the work of The Pittsburgh Study. Link: https://profiles.wprdc.org/explore/demographics?geog=county-42003

• Training “Community Data Ambassadors,” who will engage in activities and peer learning to build new levels of confidence using data in their existing work. Ambassadors will have the opportunity to explore new and creative ways to share impactful data. Learnings will also help Ambassadors feel confident bringing, discussing, and interacting with data in conversations about structural racism and inequity. The pilot cohort of Ambassadors will be drawn from The Pittsburgh Study’s Pregnancy Cohort.

• Building capacity among academic, public sector, and nonprofit data workers through the “Data Litearacy for Data Stewards” training. In these sessions, participants will learn to ask questions about data and technology, reflect on how their actions and decisions impact people and communities, and begin to institutionalize the values of equity, fairness, and justice into the data and technology practices and infrastructures of their organizations. Members of The Pittsburgh Study participate in the training sessions, and partner with the WPRDC in the design of workshop activities.