Louisville City Wire

The Louisville Office of Resilience and Community Services (RCS) has created a new tool for tracking its work. The new online data dashboard provides one-click access to a trove of information, including details about housing stability, utility assistance, volunteerism, financial empowerment, and the many programs and services administered by RCS.

The dashboard offers sets of numbers and statistics that can be broken down – or sliced – into different categories. For example, the dashboard for the Housing Referral List can be sliced by the age, race, gender, and veteran status of the applicants. And the dashboard for the popular Low Income Housing Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) can be sliced according to geographic location, date range, and which phase of LIHEAP clients have received. These tools will allow users to track the outcomes of various RCS services and programs over time. 

“These numbers tell stories,” said RCS Director Tameka Laird. “Stories of the many people, from all walks of life, who we serve every single day. Their experiences and their courage are reflected in the data we’ve collected and put on display for the public through this dashboard. Transparency is so important for every government agency but especially for RCS, which works with so many of our community’s most vulnerable people. We believe this data highlights the many needs in our community and tracks our effectiveness in meeting those needs.”

The data dashboard is a key part of the RCS 2022-23 Strategic Plan, which places a high priority on using improved data collection practices in order to “build a resilient community by … using the total value of our data to understand community needs, oversee program performance, and inform decision-making.” The dashboard is a major step toward the overall strategic goal of creating a new, comprehensive data framework to support and inform agency goals and objectives. The data dashboard was created by RCS Junior Data Analyst Erynn Moss, in conjunction with the Louisville Metro Data Governance Team, with the goal of fostering public transparency. 

“It’s the culmination of more than a year of work,” said Moss. “It was our goal to integrate all of this data and put it into a format that is both pleasing to the eye and easy to access.” 

RCS invites the community to experiment with this dashboard, and use the available tools to learn more about the work that we do. Be sure to bookmark the page and check back on it quarterly, as we intend to keep it updated as new information becomes available.

The new RCS data dashboard can be viewed via the main RCS website – https://louisvilleky.gov/government/resilience-and-community-services – or at this direct link: https://data.louisvilleky.gov/pages/resilience-community-services. 

Original source can be found here.