Data to Empower
Newsletter #002
Using data to empower professionals who support people experiencing poverty
This months newsletter explores:
Case Study Lockdown Lessons Projects Where we are at and what we have got going on Tom's Stateside Takeouts An update on Tom's experiences in America... so far!
Case Study
One of our goals this year is to share more of our work with you. Illustrating Impact Case Studies are bite sized take-outs of interesting projects that we have worked on. Our first case study is on Lockdown Lessons, a collaboration with ImpactEd. We worked on the data design element of the report, exploring the impact of the pandemic on young people across England. As we all know, these have been unprecedented times, particularly for children who have spent most of the pandemic being home schooled. Our case study features key insights, favourite visualisations and some technical background on the work. One of the major learnings for us was that despite the pandemic having disparate impact, many indicators did not decline as much as might be expected. So, the case studies in the report offer great practice for enabling learning in the future. The full report can also be read here.
"Tom delivered an ambitious piece of data analysis and visualisation for us to challenging timelines. His support on our national research about the educational impact of Covid-19 was instrumental in the success and wide reach of this project." Owen Carter, Co-Founder & Managing Director, ImpactEd
Due to the impressive work by Owen Carter and Dr Chris Wilson, who wrote the majority of the report, it gained a phenomenal amount of media support across the board. Sky News ran a feature within their programming on Lockdown Lessons. It was also covered in The Guardian, TES, Daily Mail and many other media outlets. This publicity was a tremendous and well deserved result for the ImpactEd team.
Click the links below to read a couple of the articles
Homelessness
We worked on two projects in March due to the release of new data regarding the impacts of COVID on people sleeping rough.
We updated the popular Homeless Link tool showing the numbers of people sleeping rough on one given night in Autumn. This page has been viewed over 32,000 times since its launch a few years ago. This year showed data against the recent trend, as the overall count dropped by 37%. This has partially been ascribed to the Everyone In policy but there is much work to be done still as this progress could be easily reversed.
The other work we were involved in helps to explore this - we added information to the LHF Atlas to show some of data regarding the emergency accommodation provided during the first peak of the pandemic. Interestingly, this demonstrates that where the will exists, there was a way to provide shelter to thousands of people who would otherwise have been sleeping rough.
Coming soon: Welfare and Benefits
Most of our work of late has been on developing a new version of the Living Standards Index for Low-Income Londoners. This is not published yet, but will be available by the time of our next newsletter.
This updated version has many exciting new features. It has been completely restyled to make the analysis easier to access and more engaging.
New data is also being added on worklessness and Council Tax Support. Many participating boroughs also provided monthly data throughout the pandemic, so new visuals are being added to show this monthly trend for each area.
Coming soon: Public Safety
In March we started working with a new partner, the Police and Crime Commissioner's Office for Hampshire. The project is a Home Office backed expansion of the existing InterACT Data Portal. This work should also be launched by the next newsletter.
The first phase of work will be the publishing of three new online dashboards which allow exploration of the openly published data around recorded crime in England and Wales.
The dashboards are primarily targeted at people working within police forces, but are designed to be accessible by a wider audience (highlighting key caveats around what this data can, and cannot, be used for).
Tom's Stateside Takeouts
Tom has nearly finished the first year of his Masters, which has flown by! This semester he has taken courses across ethics, the econometrics of social policy, statistics, and international affairs.
In addition, he was recently appointed a Research Assistant position as one of the Data Editors on the new Malcolm Wiener Centre Data Viz Lab, Harvard. This is a new project in development which will help make the research at the Social Policy centre more accessible and actionable. Tom is working alongside Professor Sandra Susan Smith and fellow student Damarcus Bell, on the role of mass incarceration and criminalisation of communities of colour in the United States.
Tom wraps up most of his Harvard work in early May. This will be followed up by a summer dedicated to Illustrating Impact projects and further volunteer opportunities. Watch this space!
Thanks,
Team Illustrating Impact.