Visualizing and Powering Healthy Lives

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute awarded $2 million to 10 organizations across the country to explore how to promote healthier and more equitable communities. Three out of the 10 winning proposals were submitted by NNIP Partners—Community Information Now, DataHaven, and The Data Center of Southeast Louisiana.

This funding opportunity promotes local use of a recently released national data set on geographic distributions of health disparities and life expectancy, the United States Small-Area Life Expectancy Project (USALEEP). These data show the distribution of health opportunities and health inequities by neighborhood, displaying how people who live just a couple of miles from each other can have vastly different health outcomes. For example, some people can expect to live over 10 years more than residents in other parts of their community.

Grantees were charged with making the USALEEP data accessible to broader audiences and designing cross-sector solutions to collaboratively promote opportunities for residents to live happier and healthier lives. Communities around the country can likewise leverage these data to better understand their community and the distribution of resources for residents and create data driven solutions to support all of their community members. The funded projects from our NNIP Partners provide three examples for how locally-engaged, data-driven organizations can promote healthier and more equitable communities with the USALEEP data.

Community Information Now in San Antonio

Community Information Now is creating an interactive visualization to highlight health inequities in Bexar County, Texas. The tool will pair tracts together that have similar characteristics, but vastly different life expectancies to raise awareness, answer questions, and build an emotional connection across neighborhoods. A launch event will bring together a diverse audience of community residents, stakeholders and the project’s partners to build capacity around using the data and to trigger action to close the life expectancy gap.

DataHaven in New Haven

DataHaven is pairing community organizing with data analysis to provide action-oriented information with three Connecticut communities: Hartford, the Naugatuck Valley, and New Haven. The project will integrate the USALEEP data, additional data sources, community interpretation of the analysis, and resident-driven storytelling. Local leaders and communities can use this information to advocate for action around health inequities.

The Data Center of Southeast Louisiana in New Orleans

The Data Center plans to create a series of “data stories” that explore how the history of racism, economic segregation, and uneven neighborhood development has shaped life expectancy at the neighborhood level. These data stories will illustrate how place shapes efforts to understand and address health and economic inequality. The Data Center will work with local stakeholders to amplify the project’s findings and advocate for high-impact community investment and advance local efforts to reduce place- and race-based inequity in the region.