Archive for the ‘Kidsdata News’ Category
Going to a Meeting? Don’t Forget to Bring Data
Now you can take relevant, updated data from kidsdata.org with you anywhere — to meetings, presentations, events, or any other place you want to share child health information.
New, one-page (front and back) fact sheets offer up-to-date summaries for each of our 60+ topics, 1,800 regions (every county, city, school district, and legislative district in California), and 10 demographic groups (see all available fact sheets). These easy-to-print pdf data summaries are valuable for a variety of uses:
- Quick, up-to-date handouts about the status of children for meetings or advocacy work
- Inexpensive brochures for events and presentations
- Offline reference material about children’s health in your community
Access these fact sheets by clicking on the PDF link at the top right corner of every data page.
By printing a fact sheet and taking kidsdata.org with you to a meeting or event, you can put reliable data in the hands of those who support programs for children in California.
Posted by kidsdata.org
Tags: New Features
Kidsdata.org Staff Are Coming to a City Near You
At the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, our mission is to elevate the priority of child health issues across California. In the coming months, staff from kidsdata.org will be traveling throughout the state for meetings, events, and other opportunities to help us meet our mission. Here’s a synopsis of where we’ll be, and when. If you’re in the area, please do reach out if you’d like to learn more about the foundation or kidsdata.org. We’d like to meet you, too, and learn about your work on behalf of children in California.
- Next week, we’ll be in Los Angeles and Orange counties. On Sept. 30, we’re partnering with UCLA’s Health Data team for a day-long workshop about child health data.
- In mid-October (date TBD) we’ll host a second data workshop with UCLA, this time in the Inland Empire. Stay tuned to Data Points for details.
- In late October or early November, we’ll be in San Diego meeting with some key child health organizations.
- Also in early November, we’ll be in San Jose with New America Media for another media briefing on poverty.
We also have trips planned for the Sacramento area, and more in the Bay Area. For more information, please reach out to Felicity Simmons at 650-724-5778, or [email protected].
Posted by kidsdata.org
Tags: News About Kidsdata.org
Recap and Video: Growing Up Poor in the Bay Area
Earlier this week, the kidsdata team participated in a forum for the media, “Growing Up Poor in the Bay Area.” The San Francisco forum, hosted by New America Media, began with a presentation from our foundation’s Andy Krackov, who covered data on childhood poverty in California and the Bay Area. The data tell a compelling story of the rising levels of poverty and decreases in median family income in the Bay Area, all alongside increases in the cost of rent for housing.
After the data presentation, New America Media showcased a number of youth-created videos that took an in-depth look at the face of childhood poverty in the Bay Area. One video chronicles a family’s fight to survive after the primary bread-winners are deported. Another video chronicles an East Palo Alto mother’s struggle to feed her family healthful meals on a tight budget. The video below documents a day in the life of a young baby in San Francisco’s Hunters Point neighborhood, whose family struggles daily to make ends meet.
Tying data together with personal stories like these helps bring a human face to the numbers. Our foundation will be part of another “Growing Up Poor in the Bay Area” session with New America Media, this time in San Jose. Details will be posted on this blog.
Posted by Jordan Handcox
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Orange County Workshop: Using Children’s Health Data in Your Work
Attention everyone in Southern California who need children’s data for their work!
On Friday, Sept. 30, in Anaheim, we’re partnering with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and their HealthDATA team for a day-long workshop about finding and using data.
At this FREE workshop, you’ll learn how to formulate data questions, interpret results, export data for analysis, and use your findings in reports, presentations, proposals, and policy/program planning. Working directly with kidsdata.org, attendees will learn simple tips for obtaining health information for every city, legislative district, county, and school district in the state.
For more details, and to register, visit http://www.kidsdata.org/content/ucla-orange/Default.aspx
Posted by kidsdata.org
Tags: Data Projects, News About Kidsdata.org
Roseville Boy’s Story Rings True for Many Families of Children with Special Health Care Needs
Sometimes a story can help make data seem more real – and that’s certainly the case with Justin Caldwell, a 12-year-old boy from Roseville, CA, who has been afflicted with dilated cardiomyopathy, or an abnormally enlarged heart, since he was eight months old. Justin now awaits a new heart transplant at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. His battle and that of his mother, Katie Caldwell, echoes that of many families who have experienced the economic and emotional stress of having a child with a special health care need.
While Justin is on standby for a heart transplant in Palo Alto, his mother remains at his side and has been unable to work at her job in Roseville. Unfortunately, the financial insecurity that Justin’s family is undergoing now is not uncommon for families of children with special healthcare needs.
2005-2006 data on the impact of a child’s special health care needs on parental employment shows that 24% of California parents of children with special health care needs had to cut back or stop working to care for their child. Similarly, 2007 data show that a higher percentage of parents of children with special health care needs report stress as a result of parenting (27%) than parents of children without special needs’ (13%).
See more about how special healthcare needs impact families in California >>
Posted by kidsdata.org
Tags: CSHCN
New Census Data: More Than 1 in 5 American Kids Live in Poverty
A new report released today by the Census Bureau notes concerning increases in child poverty from 2009 to 2010 across the country.
According to the report, Income, Coverage and Health Insurance in the United States: 2010, 22% of U.S. children lived in poverty in 2010 — that’s up from 20.7% in ’09, which translates to nearly 1 million more children in poverty. Also, in 2010, 9.8% of U.S. children were uninsured, but among children in poverty, the percentage was higher, at 15.4%.
The report is particularly timely, given that tomorrow we’ll be participating in a New America Media briefing about childhood poverty. The event will illustrate the challenges faced by low-income youth and families in the Bay Area from several different perspectives.
Here are a few other highlights of the census report:
- Annual median income levels in U.S. family households declined from $62,276 in 2009 to $61,544 in 2010 (Table 1, pg. 6)
- Households in the West experienced a greater decline in median household income than any other region across the country — 2.9% (Table 1, pg. 6)
Visit kidsdata.org for additional data on poverty, health care, and family income for your region.
Posted by kidsdata.org
Tags: Child Health Issues, Data Sources
Join Us for a Media Forum: Growing Up Poor in the Bay Area
As the number of California children living in poverty has risen in recent years, key programs serving children and families have been cut. A media forum planned for next week aims to address these issues — and hopefully spur action.
The New America Media forum, Growing Up Poor in the Bay Area, will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 14, from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in San Francisco, and is sponsored by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. This event will feature information about youth poverty from several perspectives:
- A presentation of local poverty data on kidsdata.org;
- Multimedia stories from youth reporters who will translate these data into real lives, describing how they’ve seen poverty affect local youth; and
- Comments/discussion from youth development organizations and others about troubling trends and recommendations for action.
We hope that this forum will help illustrate challenges faced by low income youth and families — and perhaps inspire some media coverage of these issues. Stay tuned to Data Points for a re-cap of this event.
If you’d like to attend Wednesday’s event, contact Dana Levine at [email protected] or 415-503-4170.
Posted by kidsdata.org
Tags: Child Health Issues, Data Projects
Some Data Now Available by Legislative District
This week, we added a range of demographic and economic data for every Congressional, Assembly, and State Senate district in California — nearly a dozen measures of child health — to kidsdata.org. (See the data we added)
Our colleagues across the state tell us that local data help them the most — and the more local the better. On kidsdata.org, we already offer data for many topics at the city and school district level. The addition of data by legislative district means we can show data for many more regions across California — over 1,800 in all. In addition, we’ve heard from elected officials and their staff that hard data for their district would help them do their jobs better. By providing these data, we hope to help fill that need.
Currently, there are more than 400 measures of child health available on kidsdata.org. So, why are so few available by legislative district? The short answer: Only some data are collected that way. These legislative data, in fact, are drawn from recently posted data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey; these data weren’t even available a year ago. We hope this addition to kidsdata.org helps policymakers improve the lives of children in their districts.
Another site that offers data by legislative district, for both children and adults, is Healthy City. If you know of other resources, or other data available by legislative district, please note them below.
Posted by kidsdata.org
Tags: Data Challenges, New Data
New Presentations Help Journalists, Others Use Census Data
As results from the 2010 Census are released, the need for tools to help wade through all these data is becoming clear. To help address this, Arizona State University and the McCormick Foundation funded experts to create 40-minute how-to presentations to assist journalists and the public in using specific Census data. The presentations include information on comparing data among regions, using online maps, and analyzing trends. These presentations were featured in a recent Policy for Results blog.
Posted by kidsdata.org
Tags: Data Projects, Data Sources
The Minority Becomes the Majority: Mapping a National Trend
As we noted in a blog post last week, there have been notable shifts in the racial/ethnic composition of California’s public school students over the past two decades. In particular, Hispanic/Latino students recently became a majority in California schools.
Recent census data analysis suggests that this shift is a national trend, too. According to this Washington Post article, minorities are a majority in 22 of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas. Of those 22, nearly half are in California, including San Jose, Stockton, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. (See this intriguing infographic for a more detailed breakdown.)
The census data map below, developed by the Washington Post, shows population by race/ethnicity for every county in the U.S., as well as the percentage change over time, by racial/ethnic group, population density and family type. Click on the map to find data for your community. On kidsdata.org, you can see local school district enrollment data for the metro areas noted in the article, as well as data for all other school districts in California.
Posted by kidsdata.org
Tags: Child Diversity