• February 14, 2023
• What Works Cities

Danielle Brooks, the Equity and Civil Rights Title 6 Manager for the city of Portland, knows how to break apart and analyze data to pull out actionable insights — and crucially, how to implement them well. Working in the Office of Equity and Human Rights, Brooks focuses on how residents are impacted by the city’s decision making, while institutionalizing the work of data management, analysis, and persistent programmatic evaluation internally. Luckily for residents, Brooks’ focus on standardizing and disaggregating city data means that local leaders can efficiently implement insights to provide the best services, and make the best decisions, for all residents.

In 2011, Portland founded the Office of Equity and Human Rights as a centralized office to address equity and civil rights work. Brooks joined the office in 2014, focusing on compliance and implementing actions from a large city-wide strategic planning process that worked with community organizations. This work was then built into a larger racial equity initiative and Brooks shifted to an equity-specific focus. Over the past decade she has advocated for using granular data to guide the city’s work, as she’s seen the importance of using clean, disaggregated data in order to uncover more detailed trends and better understand who is being served or impacted (positively or negatively) by city services. For this reason What Works Cities chose Portland, OR to be a leading example of the new DM8 criteria in their updated Certification Standard.

“It’s amazing how many disparities can be hidden by so many different things,” said Brooks, explaining why citywide equity work must be informed by disaggregated data. However, this work is not easy. While most city employees supported this focus, actually disaggregating data from dozens of departments that use different formats for collecting or storing this information presented an incredible challenge. Even though Brooks’ team in the equity office had already been doing a lot of work on things like how to subcategorize race/ethnicity data, the hardest part was the analysis as data was collected and stored in so many formats. “Data analysts are some of our most innovative people in the cities,” said Brooks “they’re figuring out how to match data processes to our values.”

The push to utilize disaggregated data came from departments that wanted to better understand community needs, priorities, and who is actually being served. But without standardization there was little that could be readily compared across departments, let alone citywide. Some agencies used federal data standards, some had their own internal standards, and others used census data standards. So while everyone was moving toward a standard of high-quality data, none of it was there yet. Suddenly, Brooks was not only focused on disaggregating data for equity purposes but was also part of a city-wide conversation around data standardization. “We kept digging and digging and breaking things down to get to the roots of the data standards,” she said “but then we found all the issues with interoperability, data governance at the city level, etc.”

Working closely with Portland’s Smart City PDX program in the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, Brooks and her colleagues dove into integrating Civil Rights compliance and equity outcomes into their foundational data governance development. For the Office of Equity and Human Rights to use disaggregated data well, they needed partners to help shape how the city would collect, secure, share, and use that data. Many times the group would hit “a false peak” according to Brooks, where it seemed like they would be close to finishing some version of uniform data standards before finding another challenge, like issues with interoperability or concerns about privacy. By the end of 2022 Portland had a standards guidance to look to which is not yet adopted by the city and remains a recommendation rather than regulation. Yet after so much internal work it was important that the standards live in this “recommended not required” space in order to continue to test with other departments and make sure that community contributions on the best ways to collect their data are incorporated. The city is just now moving forward with a city-wide data governance committee, led by the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, which will ideally adopt the data standards as one of their first committee priorities. 

Portland city departments had the opportunity to test out and adjust to some of their new data standards thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding. ARPA is very focused on equitable service delivery and outcomes, so staff from the Office of Equity were involved in the funding and program delivery from the very beginning. In a partnership with the Smart City PDX program in the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability and the Office of Management and Finance, a Data and Equity Strategies Team (DEST) was formed to create a comprehensive data and performance management approach for all city ARPA projects. They set equity standards and data governance structures to make sure projects were organized around at least one of ten citywide equity outcomes determined by the team and had assigned metrics to track progress towards the achievement of the desired outcomes. Currently Brooks is working closely with project teams and Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability and Office of Equity analysts on understanding the benefits and results of city ARPA projects and using disaggregated data to see what the impacts are in each equity area. The collaborative Data and Equity Strategies team built a data pipeline including reporting measure development, data collection support, data reviews, a centralized database, and a Rescue Plan Open Data Portal designed with community input. “We wouldn't be able to do all this without uniform data standards,” said Brooks. A preliminary report on demographic information on ARPA spending is also available.

Of course, it’s important to be aware that collecting and disaggregating more data, particularly data about race/ethnicity, gender, and disability status, can have trade-offs with privacy and trust. “You’re asking people to share information about themselves that in the past has been harmful,” said Brooks “and that has to be respected — if you’re getting that info, you should be doing something good with it.” To that end she works closely with Portland’s Tribal Relations Director Laura John and Brie Scrivner, the city’s Disability Equity Data Analyst on any issues that relate to each respective population.

Historically, disability data has been limited; for example, the American Community Survey only began collecting data on disabilities in 1999 and the Survey of Income and Program Participation in 2014. Yet the communities with disabilities are diverse and the lack of disaggregated data collected is a disservice, as it can prevent specific accommodations being made for specific subsets of the community. So in Portland descriptors from the population data questions are combined with the city’s identity-based choices. “This was done to better align the disability community’s use of identity-based language with the functional barrier language most used in federal reporting practice,” said Brooks “With these standards, we seek to be more inclusive of more identity within disability, collect data that would be useful to the city in practical ways for resource allocation and accommodation, and improve planning and decision making.” It’s important for the Office of Equity and Human Rights to protect the data privacy of marginalized Portlanders and follow data collection practices that are community supported or developed.

For any other city leaders looking to follow the model set by Portland, Brooks recommends knowing all applicable privacy regulations, including at the state and federal level. She also advised cities to understand that some departments will need to re-aggregate their data into other types of data standards, particularly ones required to report to federal agencies, so being able to easily aggregate up and down is crucial. Finally, Brooks emphasized that data standardization and disaggregation is just one aspect of the much bigger goal of operationalizing equity. “Don’t just collect data, that’s not the actual purpose,” she said, “ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve and what you’re trying to understand.”