Climate and environmental conditions affect health, safety, costs, and access to services in ways many nonprofits are already responding to, even if we don’t always identify it as “environmental” work. In this Community of Practice session, we’ll explore how environmental data can strengthen everyday nonprofit decisions and programs.
We will start the session with a short presentation from Sara McTarnaghan from the Urban Institute to explore how factors like heat, cold, and air quality show up across nonprofit work – from health and housing to outreach, planning, and resource allocation. We’ll discuss how these data can help us anticipate hazards, prepare for weather extremes, and better support people who are already under strain. From there, we’ll explore how climate data compares to other data sources, including how it is different (due to things like timing, scale, and uncertainty) and what that means for planning and response.
We will hear from organizations that have already begun using environmental data in their work. We’ll close with an interactive exercise that will give you the space to map out potential use cases, surface challenges, and share ideas for applying environmental data in your own work.
About this group:
We are a group of data users in Connecticut who are supporting one another as we work toward more equitable data practices. We focus on racial equity explicitly but not exclusively.
Some of the topics we talk about include:
How can we make sure we don't make certain groups invisible through how we disaggregate our data?
How can we learn to focus our attention on the strengths, rather than the deficits, of groups we are seeking to serve or support?
How can we learn from the people who we hope will benefit from our products or services about what their data means to them?
How can we help the institutions that we are part of to be trustworthy so that people will trust us with their information/data?
You can read more about our past events here.
Please feel free to check out the group. And if it is helpful, please share it!