Influencing Public Policy through an Open Data Alliance
California legislators currently are considering 11 bills related to homeless youth, and a recent article in California Healthline suggests that this attention is due in part to an innovative “open data” partnership that included kidsdata.org.
The Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, which operates kidsdata, joined forces in 2014 with the California Homeless Youth Project (HYP) and the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) to mine data collected by the California Department of Education on the numbers and percentages of homeless public school students in California.
Nearly 270,000 public school students were homeless at some point in the 2012-2013 school year, which equates to about 4 percent of all California’s public school students—double the national average. The data, sorted by county, school district, and legislative district, were made available only on kidsdata.org.
The partners released an issue brief (PDF), posted the data on kidsdata.org, and conducted a webinar on the findings. A press release (PDF) and phone briefing led to extensive media coverage. The partners also delivered the brief and customized data packets to all legislators, making it easy for them to assess the extent of homelessness among public school students in their own district, and to consider the suggested policy solutions to address the problem.
“This project illustrates the potential for open data to have an impact on legislation and policymaking,” said Regan Foust, senior manager for data and research at the foundation. “The partners’ goal was to highlight a significant child health issue by uncovering data and making it easy to find, understand and share, and then bring the data to the attention of individuals who have the power to effect change.”
The partnership members expect to jointly release new 2013-2014 homelessness student data later this month.
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Posted by Olivia Kirkland
This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2015 at 8:41 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.