Baltimore Data Day: Building Connections for Community Action

Neighborhood data counts.

Neighborhood data counts people. It counts the places that our communities hold dear, and it counts the tragedies that we wish never happened. Neighborhood data counts how many of us have library cards, how many songs we sing along to on the way to work, and how many new mothers received prenatal care. It counts how our neighborhood is changing - when a new apartment building is constructed, a coffee shop is opened, or a new mural is painted.

The Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at the Jacob France Institute (BNIA-JFI) knows that data can measure a neighborhood, but it’s people who use it to tell stories that bring these numbers to life and inspire community change. BNIA-JFI is a self-supporting research unit at the University of Baltimore that provides open access to meaningful, reliable, and actionable data about, and for, the City of Baltimore and its communities. For 15 years, they have hosted Baltimore Data Day to foster this storytelling.

Baltimore Data Day, a free, annual event hosted by BNIA-JFI, provides a forum where residents, community leaders, government representatives, and others learn how to move from data to stories to action. Most of the day consists of “how-to” interactive workshops on data availability, access, and utility that aim to boost attendees’ capacity to use data and technology.

For many attendees of Data Day, the event offers an opportunity to spend a day linking their lived experiences with data sources. This was certainly the case for Douglas Mowbray, a frequent attendee at some of the early Data Days. As a city resident, he is involved in his neighborhood association and is interested in using “data to prove what I see every day” to reconnect his community through multimodal transit or walking paths.

No stranger to data analytics – Mowbray has worked for years in various data and record management roles - found the focus on neighborhood level data an important way to reframe issues facing his community. The forum at Data Day provided a space where he could bounce ideas off others, learn about projects that others were working on, and build partnerships that could support his neighborhood work. His interactions at Data Day eventually led to a collaboration between his neighborhood association and the Maryland Institute College of Art program in Social Design promoting the safety and visibility of pedestrians and cyclists.

Baltimore Data Day debuted fifteen years ago in July of 2010 as a series of workshops that aimed to explain “to people that statistics can be our friend” and that with data, communities are empowered to intervene in their neighborhoods.

That same year corresponded with a watershed event for public data. In 2010 the United States Census Bureau released the first, 5-year American Community Survey estimates. As the Bureau writes, “for decades, a growing number of people and institutions had sought more timely data for small areas than those provided by the once-a-decade decennial sample survey and had sought that data even down to the level of census tracts and block group.” BNIA-JFI’s former director, Dr Seema Iyer proposed the first Data Day to bring people together to figure out how they could use the newly released data. From its inception, the event centered data not as inert numbers, but as tools with the potential to transform communities.

As a neighborhood resident in Upton, Nneka N’namdi was tired of the vacant homes that lined the blocks of her neighborhood being discussed by public figures as being individual failings. The founder of Fight Blight and SOS, she started looking at the data to understand in a comprehensive way the challenges that blight and residential instability caused her neighborhood.

She encountered BNIA-JFI first through the Vital Signs report and noted how the indicators helped her define the challenges in her community. N’namdi said that “I needed to wrap my head around the scope of the problem, like how much vacancy [was in the community] and how many properties had citations.” From there she created infographics and analyses to identify places ready for development or investment.

While vacancy or blight is often publicly discussed as a moral failing, a failure of the individual, or the individuals in a neighborhood to maintain and grow their neighborhoods, local data and indicators offered N’namdi a tool to counter these narratives. By using data to explain what blight is, to document it, measure it, quantify it, and put a box around it, she saw her work as a mechanism challenging this story of blame that she heard when others talked about her neighborhood. Where one person saw an empty and boarded up building, she saw generational equity and wealth lost. Where another saw a vacant lot, she saw its future.

For N’namdi – data is a powerful resource for community storytelling. BNIA-JFI’s Vital Signs, an online data tool that contains over 110 community-based indicators, “presented the data in ways that that did not pathologize how Black people in Baltimore survive and thrive in blighted communities. [The data] focuses on the human factors that are often intangible, that make up community life.” She pointed to the indicator on city permits for community events as a way to measure neighborhood health beyond economic variables like median rental prices, household income, or employment.

As the work of Fight Blight evolved, and the SOS Fund was established during the pandemic to support residents facing tax sale, untangling titles, or in the foreclosure process, their work brought new focus to the importance of housing as a matter of public health. Data Day served as a forum that both inspired partnerships and helped to make the public case that predatory systems disproportionately were causing harm in Baltimore’s neighborhoods.

As John Kern, a long-time attendee and SOS Fund employee, recalls, after a few years of talking about tangled titles at Data Day, the audience began to understand the scope of the problem. Data Day attendees began to ask what the biggest barrier to untangling titles was – in their case it was a lack of attorneys to work on the problem. In that forum, "The data sort of hits them, makes them much more real, and the solutions are built.” Identifying barriers publicly amongst the audience paved the way for partnerships, project funding, and collaborations.

In 2023, nearly 300 people attended the Baltimore Data Day event and BNIA-JFI hosted a series of virtual events leading up to the in-person event. Fifty-eight attendees of virtual and in-person sessions provided feedback through paper and digital surveys. Through this, we confirm the experiences above – Data Day is a unique event in Baltimore where people from different professions, areas of expertise, and importantly neighborhoods, can gather and build connections between one another. Over two-thirds of attendees describe their work as in service to Baltimore City or its neighborhoods.

Attendees are also evenly represented across different sectors. A third of attendees indicate that they work at a community-based organization or a local nonprofit. Government and education employees each make up another quarter of attendees. The remainder identify themselves as residents, community leaders or volunteers. This mix of institutional and community affiliations among attendees leads to discussions, conversations, and collaborations amongst people who may rarely cross paths otherwise.

Baltimore Data Day proves that not only does neighborhood data count, but neighborhood data also requires a community to make it count.