A word often heard when talking with leaders in York is that many areas of our community are siloed, meaning that the various departments, organizations, and people are isolated from each other. This isolated state makes it difficult to share and find information people may need whether it be for a research project or grant proposal.
Siloed organizations make it so people may unknowingly duplicate efforts or public resources are not used to the best of their potential. Further, reaching the right people can be difficult. Organizations sometimes lack the appropriate personnel to share information in an effective way whether it be through lack of connections or lack of social media experience.
“There shouldn’t be barriers to accessing information about your community. I want everybody to be able to easily access the factors and metrics of where they live.”
Vinny Cannizzaro
The York College of Pennsylvania Center for Community Engagement (CCE) hopes to bridge these information gaps through what Vinny Cannizzaro, Director of The Arthur J. Glatfelter Institute for Public Policy, refers to as democratizing data.
“There shouldn’t be barriers to accessing information about your community,” says Cannizzaro. “I want everybody to be able to easily access the factors and metrics of where they live.”
The Urban Collaborative’s website aims to provide easy access to up-to-date data and relevant resources from research efforts about the City of York. The Urban Collaborative team hopes that by providing a place with comprehensive community data, more people will use data to learn about where they live and inform important decision making.
Vinny Cannizzaro, Director of The Arthur J. Glatfelter Institute for Public Policy.
“I want to promote data usage. I would like people in the community to use it just so they can understand what’s going on around them,” says Cannizzaro. “I also would like decision makers—some non-profits or businesses or government or whatever the case may be—to be able to look at it and have a more nuanced understanding of the places that we’re living and working in.”
When in need of community data, many residents may not know the appropriate places to find it or organizations may not adequately share their findings whether it be due to a lack of resources or mechanisms for effectively sharing.
Users of the Urban Collaborative’s website can find relevant community data points using the Data Dashboard feature, which visualizes U.S. Census Bureau data pertaining to housing, local economics, transportation, technology use, and population data. Through the Resource Center, users can also access documents and articles used by CCE researchers in their ongoing projects.
For more information or to answer any questions, contact Vinny Cannizzaro at (717) 815-1418 or vcannizzaro@ycp.edu.
