WASHINGTON, DC (October 18, 2022) — The Milken Institute announced the release of its Community Explorer, an interactive tool that drills down into various demographic and socio-economic data to help inform policy discussions around housing, education, and health factors that impact communities throughout the country.
The easy-to-navigate tool (a how-to tutorial can be found here) can help policymakers, researchers, and journalists unearth answers to important questions that offer valuable contrasts, comparisons, and other insights into diversity topics down to a county level, including but not limited to:
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The racial breakdown of people with disabilities in a select county and the most common disability types.
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Differences in language proficiencies among various ethnic groups in a county.
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How incomes in various counties are distributed among racial groups.
“The Community Explorer is a useful tool that can help local governments and policymakers around the country to strengthen their institutional frameworks, gain a better understanding of resources needed to improve communities, and maximize social impact by leveraging new interactive data to advance development,” said Claude Lopez, head of the Research Department at the Milken Institute.
Most data-driven studies and resources use a narrow range of dimensions that is often limited to age, gender, race, and ethnicity to define diversity, but the Community Explorer provides an in-depth description of the population and offers a granular level understanding of community characteristics required for tailoring policies.
The tool provides new insights for those interested in identifying relationships between community profiles and socio-economic issues; comparing the performance of counties that share the same characteristics and may not be neighbors; discovering the U.S. population landscape beyond the rural versus urban differentiation; and much more.
The Milken Institute’s interactive tool, the Community Explorer, was created by Claude Lopez, Ph.D. and Hyeongyul Roh, PhD. The report, Community Explorer: Using County-Level Data on U.S Diversity Effectively to Inform Policy was authored by Lopez, Roh, and Maggie Switek, PhD.
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About the Milken Institute
The Milken Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank focused on accelerating measurable progress on the path to a meaningful life. With a focus on financial, physical, mental, and environmental health, we bring together the best ideas and innovative resourcing to develop blueprints for tackling some of our most critical global issues through the lens of what’s pressing now and what’s coming next. For more information, visit www.milkeninstitute.org.