August 7, 2017 — Petaluma Argus Courier

July 31, 2017 — Local Initiatives Support Corporation blog

August 4, 2017 — Albuquerque, NM. Measure of America’s co-director Kristen Lewis will be a speaker in a meeting about the role of philanthropy work in the Southwest in contributing to the universal Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) co-hosted by the Council on Foundations, Philanthropy Southwest, and Albuquerque Community Foundation. For more information, click here.

This blog post originally appeared in SSRC’s Parameters on July 26, 2017. You can access the original article here.

This piece is part of Parameters’ Data Stories series, and reads well in conversation with Ken Prewitt’s explanation of the Census crisis.

By Alex Powers and Marina Recio

To say that it has been a bad year for government data is an understatement. With the 2020 decennial census around the corner, the Census Bureau finds itself underfunded and without a leader after its director stepped down earlier this year. The decennial census is the most consequential survey exercise in the country; from determining how billions of federal dollars are distributed to dictating congressional representation, the impact of the census cannot be overstated. As the Census Bureau nears a crisis, it is more important than ever to remember why high-quality government data matter for Americans.

Inveterate innovator Benjamin Franklin once quipped, “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” That adage holds true today—without doing the work to learn about the world, there is little we can do to change it. The need for actionable data is important enough to be enshrined in our Constitution, within the provision that established the United States Census. Unlike censuses in other countries, which were meant to tax or conscript, the United States Census was the first one designed to empower; it was—and still is—the basis of representation in Congress and ultimately government spending.

Publicly available data are tremendously valuable and empowering. To give an example close to home, without these data, our organization, Measure of America—a project of the Social Science Research Council— would not have the raw materials necessary for our calculations of life expectancy at birth, youth disconnection, and many other vital measures of the lives of ordinary Americans.

These calculations, in turn, provide the public health workforce, community organizations, youth training programs, and philanthropies with important statistics to inform their work. We learned, for example, that California’s Latinos, on average, outlive whites in the state by 3.6 years. In the Baltimore metro area, Asian Americans outlive African Americans in the same city by an average of 17 years (90.5 years vs. 73.4 years). We learned that, though fewer young people are disconnected from school and work today than were before the peak of the Great Recession, about one in four young people ages 16 to 24 who are Native American or live in the rural South are still disconnected.

The hallmark of our work, and a product of openly available data, is a measure of well-being and access to opportunity in American communities called the American Human Development Index. It is based on the time-tested index used by the United Nations each year to measure development in every country. This index connects three basic areas of life—health, education, and standard of living—on one scale, allowing well-being comparisons between places and groups.

For health, our American Human Development Index requires life expectancy at birth, a basic summary measure of survival. Using mortality and population data from an agreement with the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we have calculated life expectancy at birth for every US state, congressional district, major metro area, and for the major racial and ethnic groups in each of these geographies.

These data have been cited in theLancet, the American Journal of Public Health, and over forty other journal articles as well as twenty-six books since we began in 2008. They are the benchmark used by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for international comparisons and have been used by state and local health departments across the country. Illinois has used them to study their aging population, New Orleans to map domestic violence, amongst many others. In short, there is tremendous demand for these data as a basis for research, policy, advocacy, and local actions to build healthier communities. And without the costly investment of public agencies in data collection, these next steps would not be possible.

As we discuss what we should invest in as a nation, let’s keep in mind that government data is not a luxury; it is a public good and a necessity. Our jobs, and those of many other researchers (from hedge fund analysts and geologists to historians and cancer geneticists), are dependent on the government to collect and make data available that no other organization has the capacity to produce. Without it, we would know much less about the world we live in—and what we can do to improve it.

July 25, 2017 — Sonoma West Times & News

July 22, 2017 — Noozhawk

July 22, 2017 — Valley News

July 20, 2017 — Deseret News Utah

Co-Authors: Corey Matthews, National Director of LeadersUp and Kristen Lewis, Co-Director, Measure of America

Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” If you currently live in Chicago, you know what it feels like to be living a tale of two cities. On the one hand, the city boasts the third-largest metro economy in the United States. It is a global financial center, has a diverse industry base and numerous institutions of higher learning, and is home to the second-busiest airport in the world. It is also home to some of the most crime-ridden and impoverished neighborhoods in America. The city’s economic, racial, and social diversity is reflected in the marked disparities for opportunity youth—teens and young adults who disconnected from school and work—who live along the shores of Lake Michigan. Chicago struggles to address a myriad of persistent challenges in achieving educational, social, economic, and political equity. Through investments in system-level policy change is a story of national importance.  Indeed, Chicago is being closely watched by academic and policymaking organizations that are seeking to identify potential smart solutions to closing the opportunity divide in under-resourced urban communities.

Scholars, activists, influencers, and media personalities attest to the positive power of jobs in disrupting violence in Chicago’s impoverished neighborhoods – a claim that has been substantiated by academic studies. Jobs as a proposed solution makes good sense by all economic, political, and social standards; find ways for companies to hire young adults from Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods and the crime rate will go down. However, there is a disconnect in helping young adults find viable career opportunities with companies, even those that are sorely lacking the talent they need to meet workforce demands. Research suggests that for every 100 disconnected young adults, communities (can) lose up to 1.5 million dollars in social and economic gains. More than 150,000 of those young adults live in Chicagoland. Meanwhile, companies that comprise the transportation, distribution, and logistics sector, such as FedEx, UPS, and C.H. Robinson, are projected to grow by at least 4.8% within the next ten years—and they need employees. Bringing industry and these young adults together has tremendous potential as a win-win-win solution for employers, opportunity youth, and Chicagoland as a whole.

LeadersUp partnered with Measure of America, a research project of the Social Science Research Council, to stimulate a dialogue on how we can support young adults and link them to career opportunities in Chicago’s fractured neighborhoods. Youth disconnection research and data visualizations developed by Measure of America created a framework for the discussion based on the evidence and provided a common language to explore pathways for potential solutions. Together, we planned and facilitated an innovation lab to understand the challenges in connecting young adults from the toughest neighborhoods to industry with a high demand for entry-level to middle-skill talent.

The goal was to identify, quantify, and clarify issues impacting vulnerable young adults—among them youth who are single parents, are homeless, have limited skills, and are involved with the justice system—and work with 35 representatives from community colleges, industry representatives, human resources professionals, and vital community organizations to find concrete, actionable ways to connect youth to secure career pathways.

The overarching barriers included a lack of trust between youth and employers, a perceived lack of transparency around hiring decisions, and perceived system-level biases. A report prepared after the innovation lab highlights our findings and presents recommendations for practitioners, policymakers, system leaders, employers, community colleges, and other stakeholders to repair trust among young adults and communicate the promise and potential of career pathways within the transportation, distribution, and logistics Industry.

LeadersUp Career 360 is a new multi-level and cross-sectoral experience designed to connect industry to young adult talent through career pathway development and career exploration. Click here to see a recap of the Career 360 Innovation Session that lead to the findings in this report.

We hope the report will serve as call to action for other communities to engage diverse stakeholders, including young adults, to develop meaningful solutions to reconnect young people and prevent future disconnection.

Websites:

www.measureofamerica.org

www.leadersup.org