San Antonio nonprofit organization SA2020 on Jan. 31 convened The Collective, a three-day series of virtual panel discussions where experts weigh the latest indicators on a variety of community indicators and how data should be used toward community improvement.

SA 2020 began The Collective by refreshing its digital dashboards showing San Antonio’s progress on 50-plus community indicators. The nonprofit also said it has released downloadable City Council profiles sharing community indicator data disaggregated by council districts.

The first day’s discussion explored how community data is extracted and how it affects public policy.

Three guest speakers offered examples of data directly guiding community initiatives, or where data is lacking and, as a result, negatively affects a community.

Teri Castillo, San Antonio District 5 City Council member, said data showing a need to increase affordable housing options citywide, especially in older, inner-city neighborhoods, helped local officials to develop the Strategic Housing Implementation Plan, which the council adopted in 2021.

"It's a plan that the city and community stakeholders created to gauge and track housing production here in San Antonio. We know each average area median income where we lack housing, and where we're overproducing housing, which has been primarily more market rate housing,” Castillo said.

Chandra Villanueva, policy and advocacy director at Austin-based nonprofit Every Texan, said Texas by virtue of its size has lots of data, but it can be a challenge to interpret and analyze available data, especially when it comes to looking at something such as racial equity and outcomes for different types of populations.

“That's one of the things that our organization has been known for since the mid-1980s, when we were first formed. We’ve been digging into the data and doing a disaggregation to see who is being served, where are resources being allocated and how the state can do better to serve,” Villanueva said.

SA2020 Executive Director Kiran Kaur Bains recalled, as a San Antonio native, how became familiar with potholes on streets she would regularly drive to classes at St. Mary’s University.

Bains said, at the time, she took for granted the idea that the city’s public works department would simply know the location of potholes and fill them immediately. She said it is important for community members to know how to connect with the appropriate resources - in this case, city services - in order to address a public issue.

“What we really need in order to do it effectively is for folks to tell us where that's happening. That's information, and as a young person, I didn't necessarily make the connection at that time—that I could be an advocate for something like streets and maintenance in my city,” she added.

Another speaker, Jennifer Tran, is director of the National Equity Atlas, which mines and contains data on demographic change, racial and economic inclusion, and the potential economic gains from racial equity for the largest 100 cities, 430 large counties, the largest 150 regions, all 50 states and the United States as a whole.

Tran said she saw firsthand how data is used for a governmental course-correction.

Tran recalled how many renters in California who had applied for aid from the state’s emergency rental assistance program were unclear about the process or were being delayed or getting denied for various reasons.

“So, we came together with [housing] advocates and our legal partners to submit a public records act request to get data from the state agency. Once we were able to analyze it, the experiences that residents, applicants and tenants were describing were all very true right at the time that the program was intended to wrap up,” Tran said.

After National Equity Atlas processed the state’s data, the information became instrumental in forming advocacy, action, policy change on behalf of renters across California, Tran said.

“As a result, [the state was] able to extend eviction protections for three additional months for folks that had applied for this program. Then the data itself backed a legal case against the state to pause them from continuing to deny applicants until they provided more transparency and clarity in their process,” Tran said.

Bains said data, wise use of such data and community engagement are so vital that the city of San Antonio’s own shared community vision statement emphasizes the importance of institutions valuing community-based knowledge and building trusted relationships.

However, in many cases, interpreting and using community data sets is not leading the desired outcome, Bains said.

Bains said there is an increase in public discussions about such issues as the pursuit of higher education, digital inequities, affordable housing, food insecurity and mobility.

“We know that data is still really important to strengthening policies,” Bains said.

Tran said her organization values the experiential knowledge of communities as a way to guide its work in research and an approach toward social justice.

“Whenever we start with an announcement or with research, we often begin by partnering with advocates to understand the challenges they're facing. Then we think about how do we provide rigorous data and research?” Tran explained.

Castillo said, even as the city of San Antonio tries to aid residents with such challenges as helping homeowners to repair their house in order stave off a risk of demolition, many residents distrust the political process.

“One unfortunate example with this is that, prior to me even being in office, residents within District 5 had came to leadership expressing concern with the high percentage of notices to vacate. Demolitions that were occurring within their neighborhoods. It fell on deaf ears, but here we are now in office, and we're working for solutions,” Castillo said.

Castillo said she and her council aides collected data and talked with constituents to develop a pilot demolition mitigation program called Operation Rebuild.

She said this process has helped residents at risk of demolition to the necessary resources to rehabilitate their home, and to the relevant social services that can be used toward improving their quality of life.

“Rather than displacing them, we're connecting them to relocation services while we rebuild their home, so that way they can move back into it rather than being displaced,” Castillo said.

Villanueva also said it is also important to have perspective on data points and properly frame them in public policy discussions. She explained how her organization uses data to try to convince state lawmakers to shift their thinking on subjects such as public school funding, for example.

“When you get data, there's a lot of different ways to interpret it and frame it,” Villanueva said.

Villanueva also said properly interpreting and framing data can also humanize the information, demonstrate its reflection of a community’s history and how the desired public policy outcome could affect that community.

“We can get very cold in numbers, but it's important to to build that story into it and and connect with people as well,” she said.

The Collective's Feb. 1 panel discussion will focus on decolonizing wealth; the Feb. 2 talk will focus on how community members can collectively craft their future.