2024: A Year to Remember

by Lori Thomas, Ph.D.

On December 6, the Institute + Data Trust celebrated the end of a successful investment campaign to support the development of an enduring community data infrastructure. The campaign was the first in the Data Trust’s 20-year history as a nonprofit organization. The celebration and demonstration of our new web portal mark a transition from an intensive period of infrastructure development to a future of broader and strategic community use of our data resources.

As we prepare ourselves for the new year and new opportunities afforded by the investments of our community partners, here’s a brief look at Institute + Data Trust highlights from 2024:

We wrapped up foundational technical improvements. As I write this article, we are wrapping up the first phase of the Data Trust’s web portal development in partnership with the division of OneIT at UNC Charlotte. The portal will provide more efficient access for our data partners and data users, as well as simplify the behind the scenes work of our staff and Data And Research Oversight Committee (DAROC) members. 

For our data users, the data request process will be available online and researchers will be able to choose needed variables from a drop-down menu, rather than the lengthy back-and-forth process with our staff that preceded it. For depositing data partners, the portal will feature partner dashboards, which will provide a number of features including a description of data and data quality, and an annual and longitudinal look at how the people they serve are also served by other data partners. 

We are betting that these improvements will lead to more information our community can use. Stay tuned for training opportunities on the new web portal.

Our Community Investors:

• Advocate Health
• Bank of America
• City of Charlotte
• Duke Endowment
• Foundation For The Carolinas
• The Gambrell Foundation
• Knight Foundation
• Mecklenburg County
• Trane Technologies
• United Way of Greater Charlotte
• UNC Charlotte
• UNC Charlotte School of Data Science

We introduced the State of Our Data report. Our annual meeting also marked the introduction of our annual State of Our Data report to ensure our stakeholders are informed about our community data infrastructure, our data, and how the data are being used in our community.  The report will evolve as new partners join us and we report on new research questions and new uses of the data. We are already using information from the report about who is in our data to inform representation on our Board of Directors and its committees. The State of Our Data is one of the ways we seek to be transparent in our work and honor the investment of UNC Charlotte, our donors, and particularly our communities, whose lives are represented in our data.

We embraced a big IDEA. Thanks to an anonymous national funder, we kicked off the development of the Impact, Data, and Evaluation Academy (IDEA). Initially, IDEA will provide an affordable and accessible certificate program that allows individuals, particularly from small and grassroots organizations, to build foundational capacity in data management and evaluation. At an event in May, we listened to members of community organizations describe barriers to research and evaluation, as well as the assets they bring. Those insights drove the development of the curriculum. We will pilot the program with some of those same community members this spring and look forward to building on IDEA course offerings over time.

We grew our staff. We welcomed five new staff members to the Institute this year including four new research associates from diverse disciplines and experiences (in the order they joined us and with a nod to their discipline) – Mia Gaddy (economics); Jenny Niu (public health); Dr. Mecca Howe (anthropology), and Fatima Rodriguez Caba (social work). Fatimah Alnahash (computer science), a member of OneIT assigned to the Institute + Data Trust, joined our data science team in January. And our Director of Public Policy Research, Dr. Liz Morrell (geography and urban planning), joined us in October.

We worked on 28 unique community data and research projects. While we were at work on our infrastructure, we continued to work with community partners on their specific research and data needs. These ranged from data services for DreamKey Partners and the ongoing maintenance of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer to evaluations of the Beyond Open and Alternatives to Violence programs. It also includes partnerships making use of the Data Trust’s integrated data, including completing a follow-up study of long term educational outcomes of students whose families accessed homeownership through Habitat for Humanity.

We engaged with the people around us. While infrastructure and tools are critically important, as we note in the State of Our Data report, the strength of our infrastructure is dependent on our relationships – with the people who are in the data, the people that volunteer to govern and guide the work, the partners that share data, the people who use it, question it, and push the Institute + Data Trust to make our infrastructure more applicable. These relationships define us. 

Our friends at Greenhouse Partners and Greenhouse Studios caught the transitional moment of 2024 well for us in a video developed for the Data Trust’s annual meeting. If you have about 10 minutes, we encourage you to view it.

We are grateful for your support and readership over this past year. If you’d like to hear more about any of our initiatives, please reach out in the new year. And if you would like to support the Institute and Data Trust, we welcome your year-end gifts – you can give online (enter the Urban Institute in the search bar) or through additional options.

Thank you and happy holidays!

Lori Thomas, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Charlotte Urban Institute + Charlotte Regional Data Trust