Opportunity Insights: An Economic Mobility Data Tool
From Harvard University + Census Data
Thursday, March 19, 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Virtual Only
Every day, we write grants to help those in our communities reach the American Dream: upward mobility. Through education, healthcare, justice systems, human services, arts, culture, and a myriad of other services, grant professionals work to define the need for services so that children, adults, and seniors can work toward more stable lives.
But how do we define that need? Through a million different data tools – and now we have a dynamic new tool from Opportunity Insights. The Opportunity Atlas and Opportunity Insight’s other tools help define, on a community level, how children are steadily earning less than their parents each generation. It shows us where children are thriving, where they have the best chance of exiting poverty, where they will struggle the most, and why.
Join the Southeast Texas GPA chapter as we welcome Emily Leff and David Forte from Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights. They will walk us through how to locate neighborhood-level mobility outcomes and community and metro-area mobility trends. You will leave the meeting with the ability to navigate to data on the neighborhoods you work in to power your grant writing to further the Opportunity Insight mission and our own: breaking the barriers of economic opportunity!
Cost:
Free for GPA members and $15 for the public.
About the Speakers:
David Forte
Director of Research Translation and Strategic Initiatives
David Forte is the Director of Research Translation and Strategic Initiatives at Opportunity Insights. In this role, David focuses on building out strategic activities that bring OI research into practice. David comes to OI from prior work in housing policy, including leading impact and evaluation efforts at the King County Housing Authority, and more recently, consulting on data analysis and evaluation with public agencies across the United States working to end homelessness. He also has experience as a Research Associate at Harvard Business School and in program evaluation and fund development roles with nonprofit organizations in Seattle, WA and Boston, MA.
David holds a master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance and a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from Texas A&M University.
Emily Leff
Research and Data Communications Associate
Emily Leff is a Research and Data Communications Associate at Opportunity Insights. Emily has worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at Plural Connections, an interdisciplinary research and action lab whose mission is to use tools from data science and design to advance pluralism. Previously, she worked at Insurify, a Boston-based insurtech startup, as a Quantitative Content Writer and Data & Research Lead. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology and Data Analysis from Wesleyan University and Master of Science in Information Design & Data Visualization from Northeastern University.