KNOWLEDGE 4 EQUITY:

USING DATA TO ADDRESS HEALTH DISPARITIES

Conference Resources and Materials

Thank you for attending the Knowledge 4 Equity (K4E) Conference in Silver Spring, Maryland and for returning the Conference Evaluation Survey. We hope you left the conference with knowledge and tools to empower you to continue to address health disparities in your community.  We are excited to offer you access to conference workshops materials, presenter/attendee contact information, regional health assessment data, and helpful guides on using existing data.

Plenary Speaker- Dr. Stephen Thomas
StephenThomas.ppt

Workshops

Mapping and Data Visualization

  • Mapping our Voices for Equality: Using Online Maps and Stories as a Tool to Promote Health Equity- Natasha Freidus and Martha Zuniga

    MOVE is a grassroots community engagement strategy using digital stories, online mapping, and face-to-face organizing to influence policy, systems and environmental change. Participants learned how communities in King County, WA gained capacity to produce, disseminate and use stories to increase equity.

  • Community Assets on a Map: Facilitating a Community-Engaged Mapping Exercise- Deanna Cooke PhD

    This workshop introduced community research concepts through the framework of the Community Based Participatory Action Research and Mapping. This group mapping activity provides and opportunity to generate shared knowledge of issues and visualize community knowledge. 

  • Useful Ways to Visualize and Analyze Data Sets- Georges Grinstein

    This workshop discussed different visualization techniques (exploratory, confirmatory, presentation and interactive presentation) and showed how each technique changes the approach taken when presented on a web page. All examples used Weave, the new open source program available for free for web based analysis and visualization.

  • Connecting to Maps, Data, and Peer Learning on Community Commons- Jamie Kleinsorge

    This session provided participants with a basic understanding of utilizing Community Commons for data visualization, interpreting and using data for strategy development and improvement, and accessing existing data.

Data Basics

  • Data Makes a Difference: Practical Tips for Using Data to Address Health Disparities- Kien Lee PhD and Rosalie Torres PhD

    In this session, participants learned to find, understand, interpret and use data to support work to address health disparities. Community organizations with little to no exposure to data walked through a common scenario process to address a health disparity

  • Drawing Conclusions from Data and Presenting Them to Others- Rosalie Torres, PhD 

    This session taught basics on interpreting graphs and charts of data related to health disparities, with the goal of presenting conclusions to others. This session also covered how communication is used as a strategy for ending health disparities.

  • Online Resources for Local Employment and Economics Data- Jeff Matson

    This session examined a wide variety of data on employment, income and poverty available on a local/neighborhood level. Participants learned tools to quickly find relevant information to generate reports and create other data projects- maps, charts and tables. 

  • The Social Determinants of Health: Making the Most of the American Community Survey- Stephen Borders PhD

    The American Community Survey (ACS) is a potentially powerful tool in identifying populations and geographic areas with health disparities. Workshop attendees learned about the differences between Census geographies, ACS datasets, selecting appropriate variables related to the social determinants of health, and establishing baseline and trend measures to develop visually appealing results.

  • What are you Really Trying to Change? Determining Your Local Conditions- William Geary, PhD

    Data for local conditions exists in all communities, but when it comes to health disparities, community groups need to determine how their local conditions differ from generally available data. Workshop participants learned what local conditions data is, where to collect it and how to analyze/use it.

Building Capacity

  • Creating a Data Strategy: Building Staff and Community Capacity- Sara Mokuria

    Participants learned to strengthen organizational capacity by learning components of a data strategy. With data strategy, staff can optimize solutions to creative programs. These materials helped organizations to gain insight on how to evolve into an organization in which data works for your organization. 

  • Building Community Capacity to Collect Data on Health Disparities- Peggy Toy

    This session discussed how to use existing, relevant data and learn to produce your own estimates on health disparities. The session explored looking for what type of data is needed, how to collect data, and how to create reports that estimate local data when only state and federal data is available.

  • Stronger Together: Data Collaboratives and Partnerships- Kathy Pettit and Todd ClausenUsing the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, participants learned a broad understanding of the possibilities for partnerships around data. Also, participants completed a collective problem solving exercise around an organization’s needs.

Using Data for Advocacy and Community Engagement

  • Community-Driven Health Equity: Presentation of the THRIVE Framework and Indicators to Support Local Action- Xavier Morales

    The THRIVE approach translates health equity knowledge into community action by developing shared understandings, assessing the current state of health determinants, translating output into action, and determining available indicators for measuring progress.
  • Getting Equity Advocacy Results: GEAR for Improvement, GEAR for Learning- Victor Rubin 

    PolicyLink showed how they have identified essential components of successful equity advocacy for policy change. GEAR is a suite of benchmarks, methods and tools for advocates, organizers and their allies to track results of campaigns and successfully measure, document and assess their progress.

  • Engaging the Grassroots Community with Your Health Equity Data- Tom Wolff

    Participants discovered how to use the Boston Public Health Commission’s Center for Health Equity and Social Justice model. This model addresses community struggles and solutions with stories and tools.

Data on Persons With Disabilities


Available Data in your State

The documents below were produced through a data inventory undertaken by Community Science, Inc., for the National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities (NPA) led by the Office of Minority Health. These document includes the location of community-level data (i.e., data that can be disaggregated by city, county, neighborhood, or zip code) available from state agencies and organizations on social determinants and health outcomes in every state.They are organized by HHS Regions. Select the region in which you state is located to access this information.

HHS Region 1: Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut

HHS Region 2: New Jersey, New York, Virgin Islands

HHS Region 3: Delaware, District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia,

HHS Region 4: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee

HHS Region 5: Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin

HHS Region 6: Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas

HHS Region 7: Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska

HHS Region 8: Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming

HHS Region 9: Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada

HHS Region 10: Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Washington


Other Resources

Data Set Directory: This guide contains an extensive list of existing data sets that exist and can be used to address determinants of health. This set is organized into 12 dimensions (categories) of the social environment- Economy, Employment, Education, Political, Environmental, Housing, Medical, Governmental, Public Health, Psychosocial, Behavioral, and Transport.

Data Guide – What Do the Numbers and Text Really Mean?: This guide is designed to help you to harness the power to create data-driven strategies and create the ability to access, analyze, interpret and use data to build community and create strategies to make a healthier community.

Promoting Health Equity – A Resource to Help Communities Address Social Determinants of Health: This CDC resource helps public health practitioners by providing tools and examples for promoting health and achieving health equity. Content is drawn from results of a diverse forum of community participants who have experienced developing, implementing, and evaluating interventions to address conditions contributing to health inequalities.

Stories – Using Information in Community Building and Local Policies: This guide is the result of a collaborative partnership between the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and the Urban Institute. The guide presents cases from 18 cities where NNIP partners have been working to achieve improvements in community conditions.


Contact Information

Organization and contact information for conference participants, speakers and staff can be found here.


Community Panel Presentations

The Community Panel featured four organization leaders who shared success stories in combating health disparities.

Earl Hatley, M.A.: President, LEAD Agency, Inc.

Judith Bradford, Ph.D.:  Director, Center for Population Research in LGBT Health/ Co-chair, The Fenway Institute

Breanna Morrison: Community Health Councils, Inc.

Shoshanah Brown, M.S., M.B.A.: Executive Director, A.I.R. Harlem

Federal Resources Session/Town Hall Panelists

Doris Werwie, Ph.D.: US Department of Education National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research

Karen DeBlasio: HUD Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs

Jennifer Cheeseman Day, Ph.D.: U.S. Census Bureau Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division

Rashida Dorsey, Ph.D.: Department of Health and Human Services

James Craver: US Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Terence McMenamin: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

Presentation On Conference Participant Survey

What have the Community Based Organizations told us About Their Collection and Use of Data: Capacities, Challenges and Opportunities David Chavis, Ph.D., Principal Associate/CEO, Community Science