Special Message from GLP Director of Community Engagement

February 2, 2021

2020 was a pivotal and stressful year for our city. We were hit with a pandemic and were forced to address the lingering inequalities and racist and oppressive systems that have caused many of us so much pain. We here at the Greater Louisville Project (GLP) were also forced to examine ways in which we uphold racist and oppressive systems. We have renewed our call to build authentic relationships with our neighbors. We launched a Missing Data series where our neighbors from marginalized communities can speak on data that our city has not traditionally collected or made easily available. We recognize our role as curators of our community’s data, but we also recognize our responsibility to step back and let our neighbors speak for themselves.

As a Black woman, living in Louisville and in the United States, I was used to racism. It is all I’ve ever known. My parents taught my sister and I, from a very young age, that we would have to fight for respect. We would have to work harder, and we would have to be on our best behavior. But even if we did all of that, we may still not get the opportunities or treatment we deserve. My experience is common within the Black community. That is one reason the Black community has always created and sustained ways to care for ourselves. We have never been able to trust the traditional powers to respect and care for us. We are often told what we need and are rarely asked what we need. We are studied, but not consulted. It is as if we are not trusted to understand our own lives. We are denied the right to self-determination.

This Black History Month, GLP has asked several Black community leaders and organizers to write blogs to share their work. These pieces will be shared at a variety of times throughout the month. They will speak on how they use data and how they have had to collect their own data because others will not collect it. This is part of the GLP’s continued efforts to pass the mic and share the spotlight. We are not heroes in this work. We are servants and partners.

We hope that you not only read these blogs, but that you reach out to these leaders, and others in our community, doing this very important and difficult work. I should note that they are often doing this work with little, to no, funding, few or no staff, and exhausted volunteers. They are all living through daily oppression and trauma, but they all have a “will do” spirit. We here at GLP hope that you will see these blogs, and other bogs as an opportunity for you and your organization to build new, authentic relationships.

As always, GLP will be here to assist with your data needs.

Thank you,

Monica E. Unseld, Ph.D, MPH
Director of Community Engagement
Greater Louisville Project

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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.