An Equity Atlas serves as a data and policy tool for leaders and advocates to advance a more equitable community while helping citizens hold decision-makers accountable.
The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Total student enrollment at UVA as of fall 2022 was 23,721, with 16,793 undergraduates and 6,928 graduate students. The student-to-faculty ratio is 15:1 and 68% of students have in-state residence.
The UVA Library created the Charlottesville Equity Atlas with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Community Catalyst Initiative. Consistent with the goals of the initiative, the Equity Atlas was a collaborative effort among the UVA Library, the UVA Equity Center, and the broader Charlottesville community. The three-year planning grant provided funding to “imagine and co-create a platform to combine, visualize, and make accessible data about local disparities.”
Institutional Alignment
The University of Virginia’s strategic goals include enabling “discoveries that enrich and improve lives,” including by fostering interdisciplinary research, and “shedding new light on enduring questions,” and being a good neighbor and partner to the surrounding community. The UVA Library contributes to these efforts in several ways, including its support for digital humanities methods for traditional humanistic questions, support and participation in interdisciplinary research efforts, and provision of technical resources to support data-science initiatives that span disciplines.
The Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas
This IMLS-funded project was initially focused on “determining and prioritizing the data needs of community organizations related to regional inequity and evaluating tools that can empower nonprofits to gather, use, and share equity data more effectively.” Project leaders wanted to partner to build capacity within community organizations to gather data for sharing and analysis to reduce inequality. Project leaders believed that building an open-data culture among Charlottesville’s equity advocates would propel and be strengthened by such activities.
All recipients of IMLS Community Catalyst grants were paired with experts in asset-based community development, as each grant outcome was meant to be co-produced with the community. According to UVA Library’s Rebecca Coleman, “one of the things we learned was that communities have often been harmed by ‘open data’ and are rightfully wary not only of sharing their own data, but of data that might be gathered and shared by large institutions. So, while we set out to design an ‘Equity Atlas’ for our region, what we really ended up doing was creating a number of relationships, new practices, pathways, and pilot projects that demonstrated the ways that the university could work with community organizations in ethical ways around data.”
A commitment to community partnership explains why there isn’t a larger web presence for the Equity Atlas as such; instead, project leaders allocated resources to community-led pilot projects. The project is continuing with partnership from the library, but to ensure that it has sustained support, the project is now housed at UVA’s Equity Center, which gained official status in the first year of the grant. The Equity Center’s focus on the “Democratization of Data” showcases a number of the projects that spun out of the Equity Atlas grant.
https://virginiaequitycenter.org/democratization-data
For additional information about Accelerating Social Impact Research: Libraries at the Intersection of Openness and Community-Engaged Scholarship, please read the ARL report or view additional institutional profiles.
