Centering Racial Equity and Community Voice in Administrative Data Use

Sharing and integrating administrative data across health and human service agencies can transform data about individuals into actionable information for building stronger, healthier, and more just communities. At the same time, the use of these data can reinforce legacies of racist policies and lead to inequitable resource allocation, access, and outcomes. Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy (AISP), an initiative housed at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice, began the Equity in Practice Learning Community (EiPLC) to help state and local agencies build, test, and implement new models for incorporating community voice in key decisions about cross-sector data use, with an emphasis on health equity, education, and racial justice. AISP and the EiPLC initiative aim to create a new kind of data infrastructure that shares power and knowledge with communities. The organizing speaker will provide a brief overview of the EiPLC model and core curriculum. The EiPLC curriculum is organized around six key stages of the data life cycle and includes tangible methods for centering racial equity and community voice at each stage. Panelists from our EiPLC learning community will discuss how they have used this curriculum, particularly in terms of engaging participants with lived experience, to shape data use in their respective organizations and communities. Two panelists will discuss their approach to engaging community members around data governance, data documentation, decision-making, and the use of research findings in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina. Two other panelists will focus on the impacts of institutional and structural racism on day-to-day data access and use practices and share concrete ways to address these impacts and incorporate community voice into data governance. EiPLC panelists will also talk about roadblocks and successes they've experienced, framed as lessons learned for the audience. All presenters will reflect upon the ways in which centering racial equity and community voice in data use has changed the nature of their work at an individual, organizational, community, and/or policy level, and where there is still room to grow. Our aim for this roundtable is to share practical ideas and best practices for incorporating community voice into the use of administrative data while also creating space to speak openly about the realities and challenges of this work.