Nicholas Pylypiw | Racial Equity Dashboard: Unpacking Systemic Inequity | RStudio
At Cape Fear Collective, we’re redefining what a town square looks like in our community, serving as a place where all people, organizations, and ideas can come together to effect real, lasting, and systemic change. By merging cutting edge data science with an emphasis on equity and the lived experience of our most marginalized communities, Cape Fear Collective supports Southeastern North Carolina’s front line organizations in combating poverty, racism, poor health and education outcomes, and socio-economic disparities. This talk is about how we bring that model to life through our Racial Equity Dashboard, from data sourcing, to modeling and, ultimately, action. About Nick: Nick is the Director of Data Science at Cape Fear Collective, a non profit which supports Southeastern North Carolina’s front line organizations in combating poverty, racism, poor health and education outcomes, and socio-economic disparities. Prior to CFC, he honed his data science and consulting skills in the marketing analytics space, transforming the way Fortune 500+ companies (Lowe's Southwest Airlines, P&G, and many others) think about their customer strategy and value proposition. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina
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Transcript#
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I'm Nick Pylypiw, Director of Data Science at Cape Fear Collective, and today I'd like to talk to you about our Racial Equity Dashboard.
Cape Fear Collective is a non-profit based in Wilmington, North Carolina. We're committed to using our expertise in data science to support frontline organizations in southeastern North Carolina in their fight against poverty, racism, poor health and education outcomes, and socioeconomic disparities.
Although we are primarily an R shop, we also use Tableau, ArcGIS, Python, and SQL in our analytics ecosystem as we ingest, store, analyze, and socialize data from a variety of public and partner sources.
The Racial Equity Dashboard
Our Racial Equity Dashboard is built in Shiny and ggplot. The framework houses tabs as separate modules for each category of data stories. The landing page contains a brief introduction to the dashboard itself, our email address, and a tab navigation bar for the data story categories across the top.
Each of these tabs follows the same format, a brief introduction to the category, followed by two to five visualizations and stories.
Maternal mortality story
Let's walk through one of those stories now. The definition box tells us that pregnancy-related mortality ratio, which is pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births, is often used as an indicator of a nation's health. The expandable explanation box gives the viewer additional context about how to interpret the visualization.
This plot shows the 30-year trend of the pregnancy-related mortality ratio of the U.S. compared to select economic peers. Though these five nations began the 90s at the same level, the U.S. has since deviated from the pack, nearly tripling its maternal mortality. The country is currently 56th in the world.
We often hear of pregnancy-related complications due to age. For white mothers, this risk becomes apparent around 35 years old. In black mothers, the increase starts much earlier. The resulting gap means black women aged 40 or older have a pregnancy-related mortality ratio almost four times that of their white peers.
The resulting gap means black women aged 40 or older have a pregnancy-related mortality ratio almost four times that of their white peers.
Educational attainment is another indicator of disparity. A college education appears to correlate with a lower pregnancy-related mortality ratio for a white woman, but has little to no impact for a black woman.
Looking specifically at North Carolina, we were able to identify a roadmap of interventions based on high-risk pregnancy factors and have shared these with our community partners. For example, increased access to prenatal care and pregnancy testing would have a significant impact on pregnancy-related mortality ratio.
Looking ahead
Over the next several months, we'll be aligning our community data platform, including insights from this racial equity dashboard, with the statewide Healthy North Carolina 2030 initiative. This will allow us to set attainable, data-driven local goals with a focus on equity and accountability through shared measurement.
I invite you to explore the rest of the dashboard and to visit our website to learn more about the work we are doing in the Cape Fear region. Please also contact me if you're interested in volunteer opportunities, contributing to our social impact investment fund, or if you just want to chat about the data. Thank you.
