A letter to the community

June 5, 2020
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At the Greater Louisville Project, we mourn with both Breonna and David’s loved ones as well as all who have lived with centuries of oppression and abuse. We recognize the ongoing trauma faced by the Black community. We recognize the trauma created by recent events. We support the many people and organizations calling for justice.

The Greater Louisville Project has tracked data for our community since 2003. This data clearly shows persistent and underlying racial disparities in education, health, jobs, and quality of place.

As we continue to track the data, we recognize how persistent those disparities have been. What will our city’s nonprofits, government, companies, and individuals do to change these outcomes? How can the Greater Louisville Project help to catalyze the changes that need to be made? And, how can we change the narrative and consciousness of our community?

Our mission is to catalyze continuous improvement of Louisville by providing community leaders with a prioritization of needs so they can focus their efforts on the areas of greatest positive impact. Therefore, our ask of you is to communicate, educate, share information, and leverage data to ensure our leaders are looking at all the facts.

  • Engage in critical and difficult dialogue with real statistics. 
  • Research and understand the true numbers so you can wade through misleading messages online or in the media. 
  • If your organization is collecting data about needs in our community, please share this with the GLP so we can combine it with data from across our community.
  • Check in periodically to www.greaterlouisvilleproject.org to see how our community is progressing compared to our peer cities. 

The pandemic revealed the systemic and structural roots of health disparities in our nation and community. At the Greater Louisville Project, we recognize that we must pursue and achieve equity. We are committed to bringing issues of equity and inclusion to the center of our work across all the data we track as an integral part of catalyzing change. 

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.