“So What?” – Your BI-Weekly Guide to Advocacy With Impact
Lovingly selected and lightly snarked by Team APEP: David Devlin-Foltz, Susanna Dilliplane, and Alex Gabriel
No Data, No Justice
Hearing cries for justice, the system responded – marginally. The Justice Department will begin collecting data on police shootings and use of force. And a good dataset is the start of a good analysis. But this is not yet a good dataset. Police departments must voluntarily report their use of force. And that may be harder to do than to get taxpayers to voluntarily report that they want to pay more in taxes. So approach the data cautiously. And check out citizen reporting from the forthcoming SWAT app, or the Invisible Institute’s Citizens Police Data Project, which provides information from the Chicago Police Department collected through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Better Data, More Justice (Maybe?)
We recently wrote about the rich datasets available from the World Bank to data-hounds eager to go deeper than cheerful aggregate stats about falling poverty rates. Better data are needed especially to understand the extent of gender-based violence. And with a hat-tip to friend of APEP Carlisle Levine, we recommend the Multidimensional Poverty Index from the compassionate, pointy-headed dons at the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative.
Shameless Self-Promotion
If you are reading this Friday morning at the American Evaluation Association conference in Atlanta, be sure to tell all your evaluator pals that they, too, should subscribe to “So What?” or risk missing our unique blend of informed snark and snarky information about evaluation-y things. AND you can meet 2/3s of the “So What?” team and hear about one of our recent projects and products today at 5:30 PM in room A602 when we will be co-presenting with Felicia Madsen of the David and Lucile (with one “l”) Packard Foundation. Check us out!
The Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program helps leading foundations and nonprofit organizations plan, assess and learn from their efforts to promote changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and policies in the US and internationally. To learn more about our tools and services, visit http://www.aspeninstitute.org/apep.
