Culture of Data 2025

The Colorado Equity Compass (CEC) is a resource platform and capacity-building initiative that helps communities understand the social determinants of health and learn how to advocate for change. Its website is free, easy-to-use, and combines population statistics, data visualizations, community stories, and advocacy tools to bring local data to life. Users can access statistics about the social determinants of health for each neighborhood and county in Colorado. This includes data about economics, education, the environment, food, health services, housing, and social factors.

In 2024, CEC launched a data-use learning collaborative, providing a paid opportunity for community-based organizations with little to no internal data capacity to gain practical skills using data to promote equity. Organizations worked with social determinants of health data to learn about the needs of the communities they serve. The collaborative consisted of virtual meetings over five months with opportunities for individualized data help sessions. Each meeting focused on data skills, from the fundamentals of how to frame data, to beginner analysis approaches, to practice presenting information. Throughout the collaborative, each participant worked on a data project meant to practice skills and create a relevant, equity-focused data product for their organization to use. Organization received a stipend for participating.

In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the learning collaborative effort, including successes and lessons learned. We will also share solutions to common data problems that learning collaborative participants encountered, including what to do when data is not available because of small sample size or there's no disaggregation. We are pleased to co-present with a community partner from the learning collaborative who will share their data project and reflect on their experience working with social determinant of health data.

The CEC is supported by The Colorado Trust, the Colorado Health Institute, Change Matrix, and Consume & Create.