Keynote Presentation
Centering Racial Equity Across the Data Life Cycle
Amy Hawn Nelson, PhD, Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy, University of Pennsylvania
Data integration by local and state governments is undertaken for the public good: by breaking down program silos, practitioners and policymakers can address the interconnected needs of families and communities more effectively and holistically. And yet, many of the institutions engaged in the important work of data integration have not examined and acknowledged structural bias in their history, or the ways in which that bias is often baked into data as a result of systemic inequities in the development and administration of policies and programs.
Integrated administrative data increasingly provide the raw materials for analytics, yet racial equity is, at best, a peripheral consideration for data access and use. This session presents findings from A Toolkit for Centering Racial Equity Throughout Data Integration and AISP’s Equity in Practice Learning Community. The toolkit was created through a collaborative deliberation process and includes site-based examples of work in action towards racial equity alongside examples of promising and problematic practice for administrative data reuse in government and human services. We will discuss concepts from the Toolkit and how sites from across the US are working to support more equitable, sustainable, and reproducible data practice.