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Data for Good: Uniting Georgia’s Changemakers with Tommy Pearce from Neighborhood Nexus
889 Plays10 months ago
On this week’s episode of the podcast, we dive into the transformative work of Neighborhood Nexus, led by Tommy Pierce. This civic data intermediary is making waves in Georgia by harnessing the power of data to create a lasting social impact. Here are the highlights of our discussion on how Neighborhood Nexus is revolutionizing the nonprofit sector through data-driven strategies:
Topics Discussed
- The Mission of Neighborhood Nexus: We explore the core objectives of the organization, which include addressing inquiries, informing programs, and fostering crucial relationships between data providers and users. The organization’s goal is to enhance the nonprofit sector’s ability to utilize data for effective problem-solving and informed decision-making.
- Data Utilization and Technical Assistance: Discover how Neighborhood Nexus offers support to ensure that data is not just collected but used effectively. This includes advocating for data-informed leadership through comprehensive training and building a community around data expertise.
- Quantitative vs. Qualitative Data: We highlight the organization’s focus on not just numerical data but also qualitative insights. This includes gathering real-time information and community input, recognizing the need to capture the full spectrum of lived experiences.
- Bridging the Gap: Learn about the pivotal role Neighborhood Nexus plays in connecting local and regional governments with nonprofits. The organization helps with strategic planning and addresses the resource challenges exacerbated by the pandemic, emphasizing data and equity.
- Understanding Local Nonprofit Sectors: The episode delves into the challenges of missing data and the importance of marketing insights to serve communities more effectively. We discuss the organization’s collaborative efforts with local journalism for deeper data collection and understanding of community needs.
- Navigating the Political Landscape: The discussion touches upon the political context in Georgia, particularly the urban-rural divide that transcends traditional partisan lines, and how this affects data-driven approaches.
- Capacity Building and Community Engagement: We emphasize the key themes of capacity and community building and the ambition to make data more actionable. This includes website improvements and the development of new tools to engage stakeholders.
➡️ Check out more links, notes, transcript, and more at the PolicyViz website.
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Transcript
Introduction to Neighborhood Nexus
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Twabish. On this week's episode of the show, I talk with Tommy Pierce, who is the executive director of Neighborhood Nexus, a nonprofit organization based in Atlanta.
Collaboration and Community Building
00:00:26
Speaker
What you are going to learn in this episode is how an organization like Neighborhood Nexus works with other nonprofits, provides technical and training assistance to those organizations, but more importantly,
00:00:39
Speaker
how they build a community around data to use data to solve problems. Where should food banks be located? How do we resolve or solve crime? How do we increase affordable housing? And you can't do that without data and you can't do that without working with different groups and understanding the experience of people and communities on the ground. So as you're going to hear,
00:01:05
Speaker
Tommy and his group work with many other groups around the city of Atlanta to better understand the lived experiences and the experiences of people and communities living in their area, but also how to provide training and technical assistance to groups who may not be far along in their
00:01:24
Speaker
data evolution, their exploration of data, and how to provide data in engaging ways to those groups, but also to community members and also to policymakers and to other stakeholders. So it's a really fascinating conversation. I think if you're working in the local space around local data, this is the episode for you.
Role as a Civic Data Intermediary
00:01:43
Speaker
So here's my conversation with Tommy Pierce, Executive Director of Neighborhood Nexus based in Atlanta, Georgia.
00:01:51
Speaker
Hey, Tommy. Good morning. Good to meet you. Happy New Year, by the way. Yeah. Hey, John. Great to meet you and happy New Year to you as well.
00:01:59
Speaker
Yeah, this is great. I'm glad we're able to chat. We've got a nice connection from a reporter I worked with at the APAM conference in Atlanta in November. And so she and I were doing this sort of data, data communication session. And she said, you really need to talk to this guy, Tommy Pierce. Um, he's doing some really cool work. So I thought we would start background introductions about you and, and where you're working. And then we can talk about a neighborhood nexus and we can talk about local data and all the, all the good things you guys are doing down there.
00:02:30
Speaker
Cool, sounds great. I'm Tommy Pierce, I am the executive director of Neighborhood Nexus. We are, I guess, the what you would call a civic data intermediary which like really, you know, kind of
00:02:43
Speaker
sexy type of organization that people love to support. There's about 30 to 40 cities across the country that have something like us all through the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, which is kind of based out of the Urban Institute. So if anyone is interested in anything I say, you should go to their website and an IP and see if there's an organization in your city you can support. But what a civic data intermediary really does
Pandemic Response and Philanthropy
00:03:10
Speaker
is that we support social impact organizations, mostly non-profits, a lot of public agencies, local governments. Just to think about data, we help them connect to data that maybe they help answer a question or a strategic, inform a strategic program or initiative. We've actually worked with a lot of philanthropy through the pandemic to make sure that we're distributing funds more equitably. We do all things from analysis to just
00:03:38
Speaker
building relationships between data sources and data users. We're really focused on capacity building of the nonprofit sector just to make sure that social workers like myself, I'm a social worker as my background, are kind of comfortable and confident with data and how to use it because it doesn't have to be like this intimidating thing or anything. Really just our mission is to grow a culture of data informed decision making among Georgia's social impact leaders.
00:04:07
Speaker
So what does that sort of thing look like in terms of training and education for folks? And I think maybe interesting for folks who are listening is what are the data capabilities of those nonprofits coming in when they work with you, when they get started?
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's, I mean, honestly, it's all over the place. We're, I think of ourselves as issue agnostic, so not a housing expert, not a human services delivery expert, although I've worked in shelters and done street outreach and done refugee resettlement just in my past life.
00:04:45
Speaker
But organizations come from all over, different skill sets, different sized teams. They might have the technical abilities or know what they want, but just don't have the time or resources. And so they can sort of outsource some of it to us.
Training and Resource Limitations
00:05:01
Speaker
I think about our work kind of in two main domains. One is that training and capacity building, while the other is more doing the work or making connections. So making sure the data exists and is connected to people.
00:05:13
Speaker
On that training side, I think for the first time about six months ago, we really started putting out our own series of webinars and trainings around kind of our four main steps that we do for everything, which is helping people ask the right questions, use the best data, tell compelling stories and make informed decisions or kind of data to action. So we can usually break anything we do into those four areas.
00:05:39
Speaker
I think this interesting, and one of our big kind of takeaways from 2023 is that when we have trainings, the people that show up are maybe the one person at their nonprofit that is thinking about data and can't find someone else to talk to. And so they just want to talk to people and it's like emotional support, but they're also bouncing ideas off before they show their boss or board. And so we're almost shifting a little bit or maybe adding to our training to do more intentional community building. So we're going to do some convening starting in February, trying to make them fun and
00:06:09
Speaker
also solves this larger problem we think a lot about, which is nonprofits don't always know what data and tech can get them. They don't know necessarily how to procure those skills or people or to know what success looks like or how to measure it. Do we get what we paid for?
Enhancing Nonprofit Collaboration
00:06:26
Speaker
And on the other end, you get these kind of data and tech professionals who want to do data for good, but don't necessarily understand the complex social issues that nonprofits are addressing or state agencies or local governments are addressing.
00:06:39
Speaker
don't have that experience and so you end up with sometimes things like hackathons that are kind of surface level. If we can get those people in the same spaces and just build relationships maybe we can find some data savvy board members for non-profits or you know find some capstone projects for students or some make some connections and help everyone kind of build capacity on both sides of that.
00:06:59
Speaker
Right. So, and I've done a lot of work with NNIP in the past, because as you mentioned, it's housed at Urban. And so the NNIP partners like, like you all are sort of like my avatar for who I work with. It's like small nonprofits, right? They've got six, maybe 10 people. And there's a person who's like thrust into the data rule. So when it comes to the data that these different nonprofits are collecting,
00:07:23
Speaker
or using, I should say, like how are they thinking about collecting it and housing it? I've noticed that's an issue is data privacy and security is not always like forefront. It's like, Oh, it's on my computer. So therefore it's secure, but you know, um, so how are they thinking about in your experience or maybe just in the Georgia area or specific region? How are they thinking about the data collection and housing side of things? Yeah. So we.
00:07:48
Speaker
We work mostly with community level data, which is typically going to be from public data sources. So we honestly don't, I guess, have to think about data privacy too much. We do often compare that community level data to maybe some program data just to see like, are you serving people you're serving? Are they reflective of the community that you're trying to serve or the target audience that you're trying to serve? But we won't necessarily be publishing
00:08:16
Speaker
publishing the individual level data or anything like that.
Strategic Planning with Community Data
00:08:19
Speaker
Right. Um, I think, you know, I think the kind of the typical case, and there's a, there's a large organization in Atlanta that came to us and they were like, Hey, we're doing strategic planning. Um, what data can you provide? And we literally have thousands of indicators at dozens of geographies. And, and we ended up, you know, helping shape the questions they're trying to answer. And there's someone that had.
00:08:42
Speaker
several campuses or sites across metro region, about 30 county region, and help them figure out like maybe what they want to know is what their programmatic priorities should be in each of these diverse neighborhoods so that then they can develop things like a resourcing strategy and infrastructure strategy to support those different types of programs, whether it's more sports fields or more early child care, things like that. So I think a lot of people come to us
00:09:10
Speaker
Maybe with this, even a simple data request and instead of emailing back a spreadsheet, we like, we'll call them and say, what are you trying to do? And it usually is something different. And so, um, we ended up spending a lot of time doing that kind of thing, but it's usually more impactful. So I mean, we really get things from all over the place from, you know,
00:09:28
Speaker
a one-person all-volunteer organization will reach out just to say like, hey, where should we open up this clothing closet to United Way? We work with a whole lot on both their data team, their marketing communications team. They gave me this like cool piece of art for all the work we've done with them. And so, I mean, the scale is really all over the place.
00:09:48
Speaker
the even the ideas and like the types of projects are all over the place. We helped write a big 65 page report about black wealth building late last year. Yeah, yeah. So one of the phrases that I keyed in on when I was poking around the website was the phrase community voice. And you've already talked a little bit about how that works in terms of the groups that you work with. You know, I think the example of like, where do we locate this particular
00:10:16
Speaker
food bank or clothing location. I think that's like a really good example, but in terms of the actual voice, in terms of the qualitative piece, like I guess there's kind of a two-part question here. When these nonprofits come to you and they're talking about data, are they 99% thinking about quantitative data? And then how are you all sort of bringing in the qualitative piece either for their data needs or just, as you mentioned, sort of the community building piece?
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're actually, we're in experiment phase to figure out what that really looks like. I mean, for, I think this will be our 15th year in existence. We've really just, our go-to has been, we know what data source that is. Maybe we'll combine a few things into an index and then we'll feed that back to you. We always say, here's the quantitative data from the census or from the Department of Public Health or DOE or our governor's office did an achievement.
00:11:11
Speaker
a lot, cause a lot of our state agencies in Georgia are like actually really amazing at capturing and sharing out data. And then we say like, but go talk to people, go talk to your program participants. We've always put that kind of back on them because we've been the quantitative folks. You know, during the pandemic, when we're looking at federal, state, even local government data to kind of work on projects and, or even tell stories, I think our role in 2020 was just to help people make sense of what was happening
00:11:40
Speaker
or make sense of what might be happening. Cause we didn't really know
Real-Time Data and Community Voice
00:11:44
Speaker
either. Um, and everyone wanted to know things like, well, what is, what does the mental health demand look like in, in our County last week? And I'm like, we, we don't, we don't know what it looked like last year. Like we don't, that, that doesn't exist. Yeah. And we've been thinking a lot now for a couple of years about, well, how do we get something closer to real time data? Look at like the logistics, um, kind of sector and they, they, they're really good at,
00:12:10
Speaker
you know, grabbing things from social media, just understanding what real time things might cause delays or surface trends and signals. And so what does real time data look like? How do you reflect lived experience or community voice and turn that into actionable data? And so we've actually, we're really,
00:12:31
Speaker
kind of reconfigured our entire organization around this idea that, you know, we think some of the best data comes out of the Pew Research Center, but it's usually not local, right? So could we do a panel survey that looks at maybe the city of Atlanta or just five core counties, and instead of building out an index to say, if you need a cup of sugar, do you feel comfortable asking your neighbor? Like, what if we just asked a few thousand people if they felt comfortable asking your neighbor for a cup of sugar,
00:12:59
Speaker
And we don't have to build a model or make an index. We can just have asked them directly. You know, the other kind of similar things that we'll be asking are, you know, we know what crime data looks like. We know that violent crime is going down, even though fatalities are going a little bit up because I assume because the weapon of choice has become a gun. But, and even when we polled at the regional commission here in Atlanta, polled the region and crime was the number one issue. That's the perspective.
00:13:29
Speaker
or perception. We don't really know if people feel safe on their street at night. We could just ask them that question versus trying to figure it out. We did a pilot in 2022 where we asked people what's the number one issue in the region. They said crime. We asked what the number one issue in their household is. It was not crime. Crime was pretty low. Actually, people feel kind of safe in their own home.
00:13:53
Speaker
And the other is, you know, we know all kinds of stuff about housing trends and we know what the housing burden data, all of this stuff, but you know, no one really is asking how pressured do you feel to move? And do you feel like you need to move or have you recently moved? What are the conditions that you'd be looking for in a new place? If your rent and property taxes weren't going up, what might you spend that money on? Which people, they always say paying down debt and savings, but who knows?
00:14:23
Speaker
So we've been experimenting and we've designed this new program in partnership with Atlantic Civic Circle, which is a local nonprofit media group, and it's called Atlanta POV. So we're really want to build a large 10,000 person panel. We want to feed them a handful of questions every month to understand their priorities, opinions, and values, which is kind of the second meeting of POV in addition to point of view, because that's how clever we are.
00:14:51
Speaker
And, uh, and so we've got Atlanta POV.org, we're about to kind of soft flop some of this stuff next week, but, um, we just want to just ask people instead of trying to build all these complex models. Yeah. You know, it's, it's feels kind of simple. It's, it's the harder work that AI can't really do. So we're going to lean into that.
Data Culture and Capacity Building
00:15:09
Speaker
Um, but yeah, that's where we are today.
00:15:13
Speaker
And through all of these groups that you have, you know, the other various groups around or in Atlanta, around Georgia and the university sector. And, you know, there's a huge, like, certainly with the CDC and the health research sector down there, have you found that there's a pretty large and sophisticated kind of data culture
00:15:36
Speaker
What I mean is you've talked about sort of the smaller groups that are sort of learning. But above that, I mean above in a hierarchical way, but there's a there's a larger there's another group that more sophisticated in and you found that they I guess I'm asking, do you find yourself as kind of the go between in some way between these kind of different different organizations in different places in their data evolution? Yeah, I think if there are go between because it honestly feels kind of fragmented. I'm not sure. Yeah.
00:16:05
Speaker
Um, a small organization, you know, actually you might, the way that I, that I see that work is if an organization wants some program evaluation work done, they're probably grabbing someone that works at CDC to work on the side as like pro bono or, or there's a side consulting. Um, right. And so it's not necessarily like a formal organization to organization relationship. Um, working on a project right now with the CDC foundation with four other NNIP groups, um,
00:16:30
Speaker
So that's been, you know, kind of really exciting to kind of build those relationships. I think if there is a go-between for some of these larger local regional state governments and kind of on the ground local and regional nonprofits, it would be us, Neighborhood Nexus, and also the Atlanta Regional Commission, especially the Research Department, where we kind of spun out of last year. But we work closely together, and I think we tend to be the go-to
00:16:59
Speaker
We're in so many different boardrooms that we do have this advantage of seeing what questions all kinds of people are asking. Because sometimes we're just asked just to sit in and if we hear something we can either like real-time fact checking or go run and find the data that we're looking for or suggest things. So we're kind of in a unique position as a capacity building organization to really make those connections.
00:17:22
Speaker
that's becoming truer and truer. Our universities, these Gen Z students that are studying data science or they're studying business and they taught themselves data science, they're interested in working in our sector and really, they're not going to intern for you if you don't talk about equity in the environment and climate change and
00:17:45
Speaker
and all these issues. And so actually I've got a pretty good list of students that have come to us and I'm not sure there's enough nonprofits with research teams. So it's like, how do we, how do we make these connections? And that's maybe deeper than, you know, just these weekend projects. Cause I just, I'm not convinced that does much other than skill building, team bonding, that kind of stuff. And how do we do some authentic solves and problems? Right.
00:18:09
Speaker
Is part of the challenge there just the lack of, as you mentioned earlier, the lack of really good detailed local data to get people to get really deep into the weeds? I think that's some of it. I think nonprofits just aren't resourced to do a lot of thinking. They're resourced
00:18:28
Speaker
often, most often based on the number of people they can serve. And even finding money to do strategic planning can be hard or to invest in marketing and messaging can be hard. People think about data as data, not what data is getting them. And so even when I'm pitching what we do to foundations, it's kind of tough. It's like, here's the ultimate impact.
00:18:54
Speaker
We're not funding data, we're funding what data unlocks and how we deepen our impact. I actually think the pandemic helped, you know, when data and equity were the two top kind of things for a long time and maybe still are, we were kind of already at the intersection locally. And so I think that kind of in some ways helped position us to just be there at a lot of the decision-making tables.
00:19:20
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to ask about missing data. If you mentioned this idea of doing sort of a broader, maybe even longer panel survey or study. In your mind, what are the big missing data challenges that you all face, or maybe more specifically, the sort of local nonprofit sector faces?
00:19:42
Speaker
Yeah, to me, data is a piece of it, but it's really about marketing, I think, and not marketing, like advertising, marketing about understanding that people were trying to serve and building solutions that solve their problems as they see it, as they identify with them.
00:19:58
Speaker
I do think if we're able to better understand lived experience, better understand what the community is thinking about, what the priorities are at local neighborhood levels, you know, like if the mayor wants to improve safety, I bet that looks like different things in different neighborhoods.
00:20:15
Speaker
We had neighborhoods in Atlanta that probably want more policing. They want less policing. We had a neighborhood last year that tried to leave the city altogether. And so we need to figure out how to build solutions that local residents identify with. I mentioned that we're working with Atlanta Civic Circle, a local journalism group. When we collect data, surveys are
00:20:41
Speaker
You know, more real time, we can ask whatever questions we want. Honestly, I don't even want to ask the questions I want, you know, the YMCA to tell me what they're trying to answer. I want Atlanta wealth building initiative to tell me what they're trying to answer. It's not me, the researcher, I'm just trying to build a machine. But Atlanta city circle is coming in and they're doing interviews, focus groups. We want to know what's driving those answers, right? Like why, why did they answer and how do they feel about it? Because I think that's where we're going to start to like,
00:21:08
Speaker
really understand what the solution looks like or even what the messaging looks like. Maybe we're trying to, you know, maybe we're trying to expand transportation in a couple of our suburban counties. We always talk about rail and I'm pretty sure that doesn't work and it's not going to work. Even if some people want that. And so like really talking to people, if it's surveying them, like, how do we follow up and understand what's, what's driving their priorities or, or even like, I think it's more of a values conversation. Um, because I bet they'd be.
00:21:35
Speaker
all about economic development and, and increasing workforce participation. Right. And so how do we, how do we use data to really understand what's going on and formulate solutions
Rural-Urban Data Divide
00:21:48
Speaker
out of that? What in Georgia, and I think many States are like this now, what is the
00:21:55
Speaker
I was going to use the word tension, but I will sort of color it that way. What's the relationship like between the Atlanta sort of metro area and you already mentioned a few sort of surroundings, but the broader the broader state? Yeah, you know, I was having a conversation just a few weeks ago, an event and a couple legislators were there.
00:22:18
Speaker
And so like, I'll use their description because I'm probably in my own bubble. But, you know, when they're, when they're doing legislation down at the state Capitol, it's not, you know, what I, my understanding is not as much a kind of Democrat Republican political divide. It is more rural, urban.
00:22:35
Speaker
And how do you find because it's kind of, you know, in some ways like Georgia is the state of Georgia and the state of Atlanta and there, you know, and then you can define like, you know, we've got our metropolitan statistical area and we've got, you know, every funder. There's all kinds of combinations of what Metro Atlanta is.
00:22:51
Speaker
I kind of think about it as the five core counties, but you'll see 11, 13, 23, 28, like it really depends. I think it also depends on like what the issue is. So the solutions again are going to look different, like affordable housing solutions.
00:23:09
Speaker
might be hardest in the suburbs where the population's growing fastest, but people don't want that density. Whereas in rural, a lot of people have left. So maybe there's a lot more vacant homes that can be converted into something.
00:23:23
Speaker
We think about internet access. I think everyone agrees that we should have internet access across the state, even though we don't actually have that parts of Metroland that don't have good internet access. Might have physical infrastructure, but can't pay for a data plan, things like that. So I think it's issue to issue. It feels like more rural versus urban a lot of times, or even like urban, suburban and rural, probably even more.
00:23:50
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think that's the case in a lot of States. I mean, I grew up in, in, uh, Western New York and certainly the difference between, you know, the New York city area and upstate New York. I mean, they're just, they're just night and day. Uh, you know, I live in Virginia now, like Northern Virginia, where I am now versus central and Southern, especially Southwestern Virginia. I mean, they're just, you know, they're just totally different areas. Yeah. I'm a, I'm a lifelong Guineasian, um, which is Gwinnett County, just outside of Atlanta. When I growing up, it was kind of like the home of white flight.
00:24:20
Speaker
Now it's the most diverse County in the Southeast. And so, um, you know, I left for college and came back and it's like, it's a very different place and I love it now. It's fantastic for our daughters. I'm not sure I would have wanted to raise my kids in nineties. I mean, the schools are great, but, you know, just didn't have that kind of diversity or, you know, whatever. Yeah. Yeah.
Future Plans and Initiatives
00:24:40
Speaker
So with our last few minutes, you've mentioned a few things already sort of planning out, ready to go, but since we're at the beginning of 2024, what are your plans for the next year? Or maybe even five years, if you've got that longer. I mean, that longer panel study sounds amazing, which they're always hard to do, but that's clearly a long one. But for the next 12 months or so, what do you all have on the docket?
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the Atlanta POV panel is a big one. There's one that's gotten off the ground recently at Rice University.
00:25:11
Speaker
in Houston that's going really well, so we're learning from them. That's gonna be a big piece of this, but I really think that capacity building and even framing capacity building as community building among just nonprofit and data practitioners is gonna be huge. My weird hobby I developed through the pandemic was reading marketing books. I don't know why, like my teenage self would be appalled, but it does feel like if you can create
00:25:41
Speaker
This small group of zealots, which I actually think we have, I just think they don't know each other. Yeah, they could probably do a lot of the, you know, and maybe it's a slack group or maybe it's just these meetups and maybe a volunteer even runs it so we don't have to do it. We have a small team. You know, I just think building this community would go a long way for
00:26:00
Speaker
both increasing the quality of data usage in our sector, because I hope to bring in both even not nonprofit people, just the data for good folks, be in the conversation. Maybe they do some data requests for each other, showcase ideas to each other, and we don't have to kind of shoulder that whole burden. And I think we can share that. You know, one of the big things as far as
00:26:25
Speaker
You mentioned our website. Our website isn't like that awesome. It's dated. We really want it to reflect what we're trying to do now. So we're working on strategic planning in the next couple of months for the next five years, but we're going to have to do a whole web overhaul. I think we really need to make data friendly or anything. This is like philosophical in some ways, but like people talk a lot about democratizing data and making data accessible. And I think that's actually,
00:26:52
Speaker
I think we did that like a while ago. I think that's been done, but people still don't use our tools. And that's because they're complicated. Like I'd actually don't think people just want data to be accessible. They need it to be actionable. And then even beyond that, um, right. So I think about like, how do we share, how do we share like just the insights, but even beyond that, I think data has to be really engaging. And so we're thinking about, um, new tools, um, or even new ways of just thinking about our web presence and, and, and kind of.
00:27:20
Speaker
social media personalities that is engaging just because we want people to want to use it. My assumption now is that no one actually wants to be on our website. Their boss or their board said, go find some data, and they ended up at NeighborhoodNexus.org because they're an expert. Now they're trying to navigate or build a map or use one of our dashboards just to export, find one data point for a grant proposal. What if we could build a GPT on top of our databases that already exist? It was just
00:27:49
Speaker
you just ask it, what's the population of Atlanta in 2017? What is it now? It just tells you, right? What if you didn't have to build a map and use all these things, even though they're all in one place, it's still a lot of friction there, I guess. So those are the things we're thinking about. How do we go beyond data accessibility to
00:28:09
Speaker
making it actionable and engaging? How do we build community as a way to facilitate capacity building for organizations? And then how do we really capture community voice as actionable data?
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's, um, just, uh, just a few small things. Oh, yeah. Oh, we've got two full-time, like we've got two whole full-time people, three whole part-time people. We're doing great. Yeah. But it's, but yeah, I mean, you've got, um, like you said, you've got all these resources in terms of.
00:28:40
Speaker
firms and students and partners. We have so many friends like which is that's like the best thing for us you know whether they're funders or just partner agencies or students or people that you know from corporate world that want to volunteer we've got a lot of friends we just need to figure out how to use them.
00:28:57
Speaker
I will be on the fundraising trail this year, probably more than we ever have in the past in our past 15 years. So just to get some of this stuff off the ground. We just built this tool a couple weeks ago, leading up to the break called the data wall. And it was like, instead of trying to like become a GIS expert, so you can get this stuff out of our website. You know, can we just have a wall of like our favorite 20 charts, and you can scroll over and it's interactive. And it's like,
00:29:21
Speaker
You don't have to do too much. You just have to hover over things and it tells you what the data is. And so we'll probably, we've got like a, it's not linked to our website yet, but it was in our last newsletter, which people should subscribe to. And we're just trying new things out and if everyone ignores it, then we'll just kill it and move on to something else. But it's kind of the mindset we've got to be in.
Experimentation and Transparency
00:29:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's a, I said that was the last question, but your last point was really interesting, right? That like a lot of this is just trying things out, right? Like my wife a couple of years ago started her own practice after working in the hospital sector for a long time. And, you know, she's working on Instagram and her Instagram followers and what she shares are just growing, but she's just kind of just testing and playing and seeing what works. I mean,
00:30:08
Speaker
You know, I always like, just try something on your website, right? Like my site, her site, like it's not target.com. Like if it doesn't work, you just pull it down and try something else. And so I, so I will end with this question. I don't want to keep you all day, but do you find that this concept of experimentation
00:30:27
Speaker
is something that people are reluctant to do because they feel like, oh, if we did not something wrong, cause it's not wrong. It's just, you know, it just doesn't work. Do you find that people don't want to sort of experiment, particularly with data, like we'll stay in the data sphere. Are they reluctant to just experiment and try, or is that just a cultural thing that they just need to sort of realize that they can do? So I don't think that
00:30:53
Speaker
You know, I like I mentioned, I'm a social worker. I've got an MSW, but my whole career has been nonprofits. I don't think there's a lack of ideas or people wanting to experiment.
00:31:05
Speaker
I think nonprofits have such limited resources that the risk factor has increases. So anytime you like, we're trying new things, but we're bootstrapping all of those ideas. Like we just bought software to run a panel on our own before we have funders, because especially with data, like it's so like abstract what we're trying to do. And we have to have something to demonstrate or show something like a demonstration project and show how impactful it can be.
00:31:32
Speaker
And if it doesn't work, like maybe we'll just never talk about it again and pretend that never happened. But like, it's a financial risk because, you know, we don't have usually this, like, you know, we've got our reserve, but we don't have an additional internal line of credit just for strategy, like innovation in our sector. Like we're not built that way. We're not funded that way. Usually if you have too much money on hand, it's just as bad as not having enough, right? As far as optics for funders. And so, you know,
00:31:59
Speaker
funders being willing to invest in new ideas, especially during the pandemic. I think that opened up a little bit, you know, a lot of communities knew what they needed and it didn't have to be evidence-based or best practice necessarily. It didn't have the journal article written about it for someone to say like, hey, my roof is gone. Like, you know, like we know what the solution for that is. Yeah. And so I think it's not like a lack of want to experiment. It's just the lack of resourcing to do so.
00:32:29
Speaker
confidently. And I think the way that I've tried to get around some of that is by building in public. So the more that I can say what I'm building and not do it in secret, because then it's like, I need I need as much feedback as possible early on, you know, and so if I talk to 20 people and say, hey, we're thinking about this.
00:32:48
Speaker
You know, when I, when I talk to people and say, what should neighborhood nexus work on next? They're like, we don't understand what you do at all. You tell us because it's like, we're the data people. We're the ones who come up with that. If I can come up with a pilot or even a PowerPoint, like my go-to is PowerPoint template of what a tool might look like, show it to someone and say, yeah, they're bad. Like thumbs up, thumbs down. And like, if we can just do simple things like that and keep progressing, then, then like we can put more money into it, but being more confident that it's going to work. Um,
00:33:16
Speaker
But I think the fear comes more in being open about what you're experimenting with. And so if you can build in public, I've been using our newsletter just to put out ideas and sometimes get emails that are like, hey, that's really cool. Tell me more. And I'm like, there isn't more. That was all I had. And then sometimes we get no responses. I'm like, yeah, maybe that didn't hit the same. But yeah, I don't know. That's how I think about that mostly. Yeah.
00:33:43
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's great. So, um, okay.
Connect with Neighborhood Nexus
00:33:46
Speaker
So, uh, how can folks connect with you all if they are interested in just learning on how you're trying things out or want to be involved? Like where should folks find you? Yeah. Um, you know, our website is www.neighborhoodnexis.org. If you're listening to this after say June, 2024, you should go there.
00:34:07
Speaker
If you're listening to this before then, you know, you might, it's not great. Like maybe check out our LinkedIn. So just look at neighborhood nexus on LinkedIn. We have a newsletter called Up to Data. So stay up to data by subscribing to our newsletter. You can find it at the footer of our website. And then if you're interested in our panel, like if you live in Metro Atlanta, go to AtlantaPOV.org and join it and share it with your friends because we want to ask you some questions.
00:34:35
Speaker
Terrific. That's great. And I will put links to all this for folks who want to help out, learn more. They can just click and connect with you all. Tommy, thanks so much for coming on the show. This is great. I learned a lot about what you're doing. I'm very excited to see what comes of it in the next few years. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks so much.
00:34:54
Speaker
Thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that. And I hope you will take a look at neighborhoodnexis.org, sign up for the newsletter, connect with them on LinkedIn. And maybe you can learn a little bit about how you could build some more capacity and help the data community in your area to solve problems and offer solutions. So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:35:20
Speaker
A number of people help bring you the PolicyViz podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Satsuki-Ramirez. And each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:35:42
Speaker
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