Aug 12, 2024

The Black Equity Coalition (BEC) was created by community leaders in Pittsburgh in 2020 to address racial disparities in the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. This work originated in data justice and advocacy around the needs of the Black community in Allegheny County during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we are excited to announce the Data Justice in Pittsburgh’s Black Neighborhoods initiative, which expands upon the data to action model of the BEC to build decision-making power for Black Pittsburghers and those that have not been included in decisions made about data in the City of Pittsburgh. This project is being carried out in partnership between the BEC and the City of Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh is one of four communities in the United States supported by the de Beaumont Foundation in the Modernizing Anti-Racist Data Ecosystems (MADE) for Health Justice funding program.

There are two initiatives to the Data Justice in Pittsburgh’s Black Neighborhoods Project. The community governance of data takes place of course at the city level, while we are additionally engaging one neighborhood in data advocacy and building health equity. 

The Community Data Justice Collaborative 

We have just launched nominations for the Collaborative and we encourage you to nominate yourself or another here before September 30!

The Community Data Justice Collaborative will recruit residents across the City of Pittsburgh to take part in decisions the City makes about data and technology through the City’s data governance initiative.

To understand what we’re doing, let’s take a step back and see where public voices typically impact city decisions. There’s the electoral process that impacts policymaking and invites comment on public meetings under the Sunshine Act. Planning and infrastructure also has norms and requirements of community input and notice. The City has even begun various participatory budgeting initiatives like with the Housing Opportunity Fund and Food Justice Fund. Now, where is public input on data governance?

This is where the Data Justice Project’s work comes in. We are convening a group of residents to provide community governance of data. This community body will be representative of people typically excluded from data decision making, nominated from the public and community orgs, and launched by November of this year.

This community data body will be convened jointly with the City Data Stewards – in a series of joint data workshops, with discussion informing data governance. We hope that residents and communities see the opportunity to make an impact on what data is available in Pittsburgh to the public, how it is used or collected, and see that change in their own lives and their communities’ lives.

The Neighborhood Power Building Initiative

The Neighborhood Power Building initiative is open for applications until September 5! Please apply here.

The Neighborhood Power Building initiative will engage residents and a neighborhood project partner in a single selected neighborhood to provide the infrastructure to help residents in Black communities that have been most-impacted by residential segregation and disinvestment in the City of Pittsburgh claim power to improve the quality of housing and the built environment.

Project Partners will receive $12-15k in funding assistance to recruit 10-12 residents for the initiative. Residents will work with data in a series of workshop activities designed to build confidence and power and spark conversation. We’ll use data in creative ways – building on many of our data literacy workshops. We hope to roll out maps, dig into data contexts and talk about what data is or isn’t saying.

We’ll engage an artist in the process as well, with one of the outputs will involve a report-back to the larger community and City, and we will encourage residents in the process to express their experience in creative ways.

There will be opportunities to collect data as part of the process. This data could be used to guide strategy and help community members build their power. We saw this happen first-hand in Homewood over 10 years ago – community members working through Operation Better Block with support from students at Pitt identified the properties most in-need of attention, coined them “the Dirty Thirty” and held the City accountable for boarding and sealing properties, demolitions, addressing overgrown weeds, and maintenance. In Flint, MI, data collection efforts elevated the attention paid to the experience of community members dealing with toxic water.

This project will also be working closely with City Planning to make sure the fruits of the workshop are incorporated into the Comprehensive Plan as well. We’re excited by the chance to do local-level neighborhood work on data and advocacy, and hope you’ll join us or stay tuned on this work.