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Create Your Own Data Viz with New Indicators on the Racial Equity Data Lab

Dear Atlas users,

Even as stay-at-home ordinances end and businesses reopen, communities across the country continue to struggle with the health and economic impacts of Covid-19. With nearly 9.5 million people still unemployed, targeted solutions for those most impacted by the pandemic are as crucial as ever. The Atlas team is focused on supporting advocates to advance an equitable recovery and shared prosperity. Here are a few updates:

New Ready-to-use Tableau Workbooks on the Racial Equity Data Lab

We’re excited to announce the addition of four new Tableau-ready datasets on the Racial Equity Data Lab: Poverty, Car Access, Working Poor, and Educational Attainment. Each workbook has built-in features that allow you to access and explore Atlas data in Tableau Public, customize your own data charts, and create a Tableau dashboard or factsheet for your community. Visit the Lab to learn how to access Tableau Public for free, check out our gallery, and explore resources to help you craft your own equity data visualizations. Stay tuned for additional tools and updates from the Lab!

Updated Rent Debt Dashboard Supports State and Local Efforts to Protect Covid Impacted Renters

Last week, we released new national and local data on our Rent Debt Dashboard, produced in partnership with with Right to the City Alliance. As of the beginning of June, 5.8 million renters — overwhelmingly low-income households of color who have recently lost employment — owe more than $20 billion in back rent. With the federal eviction moratorium scheduled to expire at the end of July, clearing this debt is urgently needed to prevent an eviction crisis and make equitable recovery possible. See the data for your community on the dashboard and check out our updated analysis.

In the News

Dozens of news sources covered our Rent Debt Dashboard this month, including San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, NBC News, Mercury News, BET, KQED, and more. Augusta Chronicle, Journal of Olympia, Lacet, and Tumwater, and St. Louis American lifted up findings from Atlas indicators. Finally, SF Public Press highlighted findings from our report on California rental assistance, produced in partnership with BARHII and Housing Now. See a full list of media coverage here.

- The National Equity Atlas team at PolicyLink and the USC Equity Research Institute (ERI)

June 2021: Moving from Intention to Impact: Funding Racial Equity to Win

Overview

Moving from Intention to Impact: Funding Racial Equity to Win, a joint PolicyLink-Bridgespan study analyzes the state of funding for racial equity work. Among a host of important findings, the report offers two key takeaways to funders who want to be generative members of the racial equity ecosystem. First, accountability, a necessity of racial equity work, is impossible without rigorous and transparent reporting. Second, funders must trust and defer to the articulated needs of movement leaders and fund the work that movement leaders say is needed to achieve enduring change. 

Informed by the expertise of movement leaders on the frontlines of this work, this report shares what we’ve learned about funders’ intentions to contribute toward racial equity, and what it will take to move from intention to enduring impact.

Even though lack of reporting makes it relatively impossible to know the true comparison of pledges to deployed capital, our executive summary details three key equity funding concerns that would exist even if all the money pledged were to be deployed:

  • The money may not be going to the full range of work that is needed to support transformative change. There needs to be an intentional focus to ensure that funding is directed with the long game in mind, toward initiatives that address the root causes of inequity, not just the immediate problem at hand.

  • The money is insufficient to address the historic undercapitalization of organizations doing racial equity work, which are largely led by people of color and focused on systems change.

  • The money will disappear. Concerns run high that 2020 was an anomaly, with interest in racial equity energized by a perfect storm generated by the murder of George Floyd and others and a global pandemic — a combination that hopefully will not be replicated.

Strong institutions that have been driving this work, even when funding is scarce, are inviting philanthropy into a conversation about how we aggregate capital, the types of results we want to see, and how to effectively deploy capital to achieve those results. This conversation can foster a relationship between frontline movement leaders and funders that makes it possible to truly win on equity. Funders ready to join in this way can learn how in our action guide.

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