Here’s how 10 orgs plan to use data to make Pittsburgh more equitable

In August, the City of Pittsburgh announced its partnership with the Black Equity Coalition to help the city’s communities create health equity-focused local data ecosystems. The initiative, called Data Justice for Pittsburgh’s Black Neighborhoods, includes 10 organizations such as the University of Pittsburgh Center for Health Equity and the POISE Foundation. The group has been awarded $1.1 million from the de Beaumont Foundation’s Modernized Anti-Racist Data Ecosystems (MADE) for Health Justice grant to accomplish its goal.

Although the initiative is still in its early stage, Black Equity Coalition consultant India Hunter told Techncial.ly the main goal is to provide a space for data to be distributed and marketed to underserved and Black communities within the city.

“We want to bring Black citizens who have been displaced or harmed by redlining, gentrification [and] things of that nature within the city of Pittsburgh and bring them to the table,” Hunter said. “We want to empower them through education and understanding of data, so that they can actually make choices when it comes to the data ecosystem within the city of Pittsburgh.”

Hunter isn’t a Pittsburgh native, but when she moved here to attend the University of Pittsburgh, it wasn’t lost on her how “segregated” the city was. Looking back, Hunter said, it was apparent that Pittsburgh struggled with both gentrification and segregation. As an example, she cited how little some neighborhoods had in the way of necessities such as grocery stores in comparison to others. Observing this disparity sparked her interest in studying data.

The pandemic reaffirmed many of her original observations, she said.

“We knew that the Black community needed more support in terms of like, setting up vaccination sites, and also making sure that we could get people access to vaccinations, but then also understanding how all of the things are interconnected, in terms of gentrification segregation, and the disinvestment that we’ve seen over the past decades,” Hunter said.

Now, the hope is that by gathering data on the city’s most underserved areas will empower the people who live there to make choices and participate in changes that can better serve them. Hunter added that in addition to health equity, the initiative wants to help Black residents gain tools to improve the quality of housing and the built environment.

“There are a lot of systemic and systematic issues that still exist in Pittsburgh,” Hunter said. “In order for us to actually make the change that we want to make when it comes to health equity, we definitely have to make a point to address those issues. Housing has always been an issue and will continue to be an issue unless we do something about it.”

Ultimately, the leaders involved in this initiative feel that arming Black residents with data with regard to healthcare, housing and power imbalances will enable structures to be held accountable while empowering Black residents to advocate for their needs.

“To ensure data are a force for good, we need to create data ecosystems-dynamic collections of information that center and uplift the needs of the most marginalized,” said Jamila Porter, principal investigator for MADE for Health Justice and chief of staff at the de Beaumont Foundation, in the grant announcement. “We’re excited to partner with communities across the nation that have taken on this challenge.”

Here’s the full list of local participating organizations:

• Black Equity Coalition
• Carnegie Mellon University Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab
• City of Pittsburgh
• The Forbes Funds
• Gateway Medical Society
• POISE Foundation
• University of Pittsburgh Center for Health Equity
• University of Pittsburgh Center for Social and Urban Research
• Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center
• UrbanKind Institute

Atiya Irvin-Mitchell is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Heinz Endowments.