News & Updates
Uplifting Our Community Through Building Data Capacity
Over the past year, through our community partnerships, our team heard a consistent desire for capacity boosts to address organizational data challenges. Oftentimes, the challenge is so great that understanding where to even begin is the biggest barrier! At the Hawai‘i Data Collaborative, we aspire to be a gateway to a full spectrum of data support services to enhance the data capacities of organizations working to support households in need. We welcome you to read this blog post to learn more about how we support our partners in building their internal data capacities to unlock the data insights they need to inform their work.
Cultivating a Data Culture Is Mission-Critical At Waikiki Community Center
Earlier this year, we met with Caroline Hayashi, executive director of Waikiki Community Center, to learn about WCC’s work and how well data enables their ability to carry out their mission. Expecting to hear about the data challenges they experience, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they consider data essential in their ability to do their work. And despite being a small team with limited access to funds, I was fascinated to learn about their commitment to refining and growing their services by employing a very simple data strategy that has continued to serve them well for the past nine years.
Aligning Data to Outcomes: Our Approach to Developing a Thoughtful Data Strategy
Whether it's providing health services to vulnerable kupuna in their homes or supporting keiki in classrooms, every organization can benefit from a thoughtful data strategy. Developed thoughtfully, a data strategy weaves data into an organization’s overall strategy and can be key to advancing your organization's mission. It identifies what types of data are important to your organization and how you will capture and evaluate data on an ongoing basis to adapt your services or programs. Over time, this approach to data can even shape your organization’s values, culture, and future strategic direction.
Our Focus on Household Need Data in 2022
Over the past almost two years, we have frequently been asked to support another critical data challenge: how to identify and gain insight from data to understand households in need of assistance. Late last year, we interviewed multiple leaders of organizations supporting households in need to understand how readily they are able to gain insight from the data they collect while doing their work, and the extent to which they are able to effectively share data amongst peer organizations, government agencies and private sector funders to gain broader insights. We learned a lot from these discussions, inspiring us to make household need data our focus for 2022.