The Urban Institute’s Boosting Upward Mobility cohort counties have adopted various methods, including convening advisory boards and conducting focus groups, to hear residents’ thoughts on what needs to change to help lift people out of poverty in their communities. In St. Lucie County, Florida, leaders opted for a community engaged research approach called a data walk.

Through this method, the county sought to understand which insights from its Mobility Metrics did or didn’t resonate with people’s lived experiences. Soliciting the perspectives of people experiencing life in St. Lucie County provides context, grounding, and motivation for the work. St. Lucie County also wanted to determine which disparities or problem areas were high priorities for the community for potential policy intervention. A data walk was another step in the county’s effort to involve residents in shaping a local plan for increasing upward mobility and racial equity based on a set of evidence-based metrics developed by Urban.

What is a data walk?

A data walk is a public, interactive event where community members can review and provide feedback onanalytical insights and information provided in accessible formats, such as poster boards and presentations. The goal of a data walk is to share information with residents, ensure a more contextualized and robust understanding of the data, and identify the strengths and needs of the community. For St. Lucie County, the data walk also helped foster collective investment among residents for the policy priorities and strategic actions that will define the county’s Mobility Action Plan (MAP).

For its first data walk, St. Lucie County created visualizations for the most compelling data related to several potential priority policy areas, such as education, financial well-being, and affordable housing. The county’s goal was to solicit community input to achieve the following:

• improve the county’s understanding of the underlying factors and cultural context of the stories these data told
• determine which data narratives were of the highest priority to the community
• build awareness, understanding of, and investment in the MAP process and the upward mobility initiative in general

St. Lucie County’s data walk included data describing the status of the county in three areas that help drive upward mobility: having strong and healthy families, supportive communities, and opportunities to learn and earn. Within each of these areas, residents heard about a multitude of predictive factors like financial security and employment, that affect people’s upward mobility. Each of these predictors has a related data metric, such as third-grade reading scores and median income, that can help the county understand, diagnose, and track changes within the three drivers of mobility.

Determining community priorities

St. Lucie County held its first data walk in February at the Havert L. Fenn Center event space in Fort Pierce, Florida, which is known to most community members and has the capacity for many attendees. In preparation for the data walk, the county marketed the event to their community through email blasts, flyers, and interdepartmental meeting announcements.

More than 100 people attended, all of whom engaged with the posters, provided feedback, and voted on their priorities. Of all the data presented, the community prioritized improving neonatal health, removing barriers to jobs that pay a living wage, increasing school spending per student, and reducing the share of families experiencing rent burden, as well as improving median income and housing stability.

Despite a sizable turnout at the Fort Pierce event space, St. Lucie County decided to seek community input from across the county by meeting residents where they live, rather than burdening them with finding transportation to participate in a data walk. With that, the county team hosted three additional data walks in remote areas of the county or in neighborhoods populated by people less likely to have the time or transportation access to attend the Fort Pierce data walk.

The final community insights were adjusted based on the added feedback of these subsequent data walks, where community members emphasized their interest in adult literacy and third-grade reading scores—education metrics in which St. Lucie County has been underperforming. County leaders then synthesized the feedback and paired it with insights and recommendations collected from community organizations, sheriff’s departments, local governmental departments, nonprofit organizations, and other county stakeholders. Ultimately, the county prioritized addressing challenges related to education, financial well-being, affordable housing, and income. Now leaders are deciding what strategic actions they can take to affect change within these four policy areas for its MAP, which will be published this summer.

The eight counties in Urban’s Upward Mobility Cohort have repeatedly seen the value in engaging their community in developing their MAPs; residents’ needs and insights help inform the history, underlying causes, and shared aspirations of various policy issues. Engaging residents throughout the planning process gives them autonomy over and power in shaping how their community is governed. It also fosters a sense of ownership in and enthusiasm for the work counties will embark on once their MAPs are published.

St. Lucie County’s data walk process can teach us the value of adapting your community engagement methods to meet the needs and capacity of residents, ensuring every voice is heard and every ear reached. By making the effort to set up data walks in several locations to meet community members where they live, St. Lucie and other municipalities across the country engaged in similar work can be confident that the time and resources they invest will improve the conditions their community cares about most.