Place Based Partnerships’ Growing Use Of Community Dashboards
Shannon Murtagh
Finding Common Purpose
Finding Common Purpose
Across the country, place-based partnerships(PBPs) are transforming their communities through collective action. Place-based partnerships enable a cross-sector of community leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to coalesce and collaborate around a common set of goals to meet basic needs and improve education,economic, and health outcomes for people, particularly people of color and families with low incomes who live in a defined geographic area.
Data — its collection, use, and accessibility — is a key component of place-based work. It plays a critical role in understanding how people are faring and accessing available policies, programs and use of resources. It can also build public awareness and support of collective movement towards a common vision. A key strategy employed by many place-based initiatives, and the focus of this brief, is the use of outcome-focused community dashboards to collect, assess, and publicly share how a community is doing on various social issues.
Noting a lack of research around the use and effectiveness of community dashboards across placed-based initiatives, Finding Common Purpose (FCP), a non-partisan funder collaborative supporting place-based efforts that expand economic mobility and tackle income inequality, investigated how place-based initiatives across the country are using and sustaining community dashboards to advance their mission. FCP is investing in the idea that when these initiatives use community dashboards, they are better able to improve lives and reduce disparities. To better understand current use of community dashboards in the field, FCP created a database of 572 place-based initiatives across the United States in 2022, conducted research on all 572, and selected ten to interview. This field-building brief synthesizes the findings from the database and those interviews, highlighting best practices for the development, use, and sustenance of community dashboards to accelerate place-based partnerships.