Posts Tagged ‘News About Kidsdata.org’

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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].

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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

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Developers Find Intriguing Ways to Display Data from Kidsdata.org

Innovative data displays like this one are featured in the winning team’s entry.

In the spirit of this week’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, we’d like to announce the winner of kidsdata.org’s recent developer challenge.

In partnership with Health 2.0, our foundation challenged developers and designers to use data from kidsdata.org to create compelling summaries that draw attention to key problems affecting the health and well being of children. Teams were asked to use their creativity in making data about children engaging and easy to understand in any format they chose – a mobile or web application, visualization or game – the goal being to promote action from policymakers, advocates and other stakeholders.

This online challenge is part of a national initiative to foster broad interest in public data, and all the submissions we got for our challenge provided us with interesting perspectives on how we can present data from kidsdata.org. We also participated in a live challenge, or code-a-thon, earlier this year.

The big winner for our foundation’s challenge is Team Big Yellow Star, for its interactive tool Mapping Health, a web-based application that allows users to explore different health indicators by state, county and race/ethnicity, with the goal of revealing racial disparities and areas of improvement. The site consists of four informational sections: state level data, state demographics, county level concerns and race/ethnicity and location.

Many thanks to our judges, subject experts from across California:

  • Ramin Bastani, founder and CEO of Qpid.me
  • Toby Ewing, consultant for California’s Senate Governance and Finance Committee
  • Louis Freedberg, senior reporter for and advisor to California Watch
  • Wendy Lazarus, founder and co-president of The Children’s Partnership
  • Rosie Mestel, editor, Health and Science for the Los Angeles Times

You can learn more details about the Local Children’s Data challenge here, and more details about the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge here.


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Introducing Kidsdata.org’s New Data Manager

Here at the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, we’re thrilled to welcome a new member to the kidsdata.org team.

Regan Foust, PhD, is our new data manager, and will lead all things data. Regan will make sure that the data on kidsdata.org are continually updated, both to ensure the quality and usefulness you’ve come to expect from our site.

A seasoned researcher, Regan holds a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Virginia, and comes to the foundation from Sociometrics, a research and development firm specializing in social science research. She has extensive research and evaluation experience in the fields of education, child welfare, and mental health, and she is excited to help kidsdata.org users understand and make use of our child health data.

Regan can answer any questions you might have about the data available on kidsdata.org — or what’s coming. Feel free to e-mail her – or any of us on the kidsdata team – at [email protected].

Posted by JoAnna Caywood

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Organizations Statewide Win Grants to Use Data to Promote Children’s Health

Last fall, kidsdata.org launched a pilot program to offer grants to organizations statewide that want to make better use of children’s data in their work. Our goal: To encourage creative strategies for using data to bring attention to key issues facing children, and to promote the use of data in efforts to improve children’s lives.

Interest was strong; we received dozens of worthy proposals from across the state. We ultimately chose 14 proposals, all of which are for approximately $10,000. The grants will be used for a range of purposes, including data analysis and development, training and education, and public information campaigns. Much of the data to be used in the projects will come from kidsdata.org, and the grants will serve children across the state, from Shasta County to Stockton to San Diego. See the full list of grantees >>

As we begin to see results from these grants over the next year, we’ll showcase the projects on kidsdata.org and through this blog. And while this program is a pilot, we encourage you to sign up to be notified of any future kidsdata.org grant opportunities.

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Find Kidsdata.org Across California

Kidsdata.org has been statewide for a year now, and while our traveling for 2010 may be winding down, you can find us at several upcoming conferences:

  • Kidsdata.org will have a presence at the California Working Families Policy Summit in Sacramento on Jan. 12. This annual conference is presented by the California Center for Research on Women and Families. For more information, visit http://www.ccrwf.org/.
  • We’ll be sponsoring the  25th Annual San Diego International Conference on Child and Family Maltreatment, presented by Rady Children’s Hospital and the Chadwick Center for Children and Families, which will be held Jan. 23-28. More information is available at http://www.sandiegoconference.org/
  • Also in late January, we’ll be sponsoring and presenting at the Friends for Youth Mentoring Conference, on Jan. 27 and 28. The conference brings together mentoring professionals from around the world for learning, collaboration and networking. http://www.friendsforyouth.org/MI-Conference.html

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What Data Would You Like to See on Kidsdata.org?

Want to know when data of interest to you are updated? Sign up for e-alerts to get data updates tailored to your interests that are sent weekly or monthly.

Just a year ago, kidsdata.org expanded from the Bay Area to include wide-ranging data on children’s health and well being for every city, school district, and county in California.

We’re continually updating the hundreds of measures that are available through kidsdata.org (see an A to Z list of available data), and enhancing the site to make it even easier to find, interpret, and share data.

Over the next year, we’ll be adding data on these topics, among others:

  • Poverty
  • Preterm Births
  • Obesity
  • Environmental Health (air and water quality, lead poisoning, etc.)
  • Truancies, Suspensions, and Expulsions
  • Youth Not Working and Not in School

See the Full List of New Indicators We’re Adding to Kidsdata.org >>

In addition to what we’re adding and what’s now available, what other measures would you like us to consider offering through kidsdata.org? If you know of data sources for what you’re suggesting, that would help too.

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Partnership with CHKS Provides Easy Access to Depression, Bullying and Other Key Datasets

Finding timely measures of critical issues such as teenage depression, bullying, and drug use can be quite challenging. Fortunately, here in California, we have a rich database of self-reported information for these and other behavioral/emotional health topics through the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS). Thanks to a partnership with WestEd, which administers the survey, and the California Department of Education, kidsdata.org offers more than 80 indicators from CHKS – all available at the school district level. This month, we’re extending that partnership, with WestEd’s announcement of the launch of its new website, Query CHKS, which allows users to view and customize data from CHKS directly from WestEd’s own site.

Query CHKS combines the wealth of valuable data from the survey with the data display of kidsdata.org, allowing for easy access to the millions of data points available through CHKS. Many of the tools available on kidsdata.org now are available on Query CHKS, including the ability to view data as trend or bar graphs, maps, pie charts, and tables; as well as the options to download or copy those data.

And, as the data are updated on kidsdata.org, they will automatically be updated on QueryCHKS.

You can add a graph from kidsdata.org to your website, too. Simply find the data you’re interested in, customize the chart with your preferences, and click “embed” in the top right.


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Just Announced: RFP from kidsdata.org on Using Data to Improve Health of CA Children

We just announced the following RFP:

The Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health seeks proposals for up to $10,000 from nonprofits, government-based organizations, university-based entities, or collaboratives for projects that use quality data, including data from the foundation’s kidsdata.org website, to enhance the health and well being of children and families in California. Projects can address a specific community/region or the state as a whole. More information

Projects may involve a range of activities:

  • Data analysis
  • Convenings
  • Public education campaigns
  • Targeted education to specific audiences
  • Trainings
  • Data development/improvement

This is the first time our foundation has offered RFPs associated with kidsdata; we look forward to seeing the proposals. So if you have a project in mind that makes use of data to promote children’s health and well being, we encourage you to apply by Monday, Nov. 1, 2010.

Application instructions and more details >>

Posted by Andy Krackov

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Using Kidsdata.org to Advocate for Your School District

Are you a PTA member? Work for an education foundation? Advocate for education improvements?

If so, kidsdata.org can help you. The site offers wide-ranging data about students statewide – at the county and school district levels. You can use these data to monitor trends, assess needs, educate your constituents, and advocate for improvements.

Examples of Data Available for School Districts Across California:

(Click “see related data” on the pages below to see all available indicators for that topic)

Data can be viewed as maps and tables or bar, trend, and pie graphs, and many measures can be customized by locale, year, ethnicity, grade, and more. You even can obtain summaries of data for every school district in California — and customize those summaries to suit your needs.

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