The Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy (ICYFP) at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management has launched diversitydatakids.org, a new online data and analysis tool that provides insight into well-being and equity among the child population in the United States.

The site allows users to create customized profiles, rankings and maps that make data visual and digestible. It also features a neighborhood-level child opportunity index, the first of its kind, developed in partnership with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. In addition to providing this index and hundreds of standard measures broken down by race and ethnicity, this site also generates unique, equity-focused data on known structural factors that drive existing disparities among varying racial and ethnic groups. It allows users to zoom in from a national perspective to ever-small levels of geography: examining individual metropolitan areas, school districts, and in some cases even neighborhoods, providing pinpoint views of the often nuanced inequities present among children of varying racial and ethnic groups.



“The U.S. child population is increasingly racially and ethnically diverse, but unfortunately not all children have the same opportunities for healthy development,” said Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, Director of ICYFP and principal investigator of diversitydatakids.org. “We hope that our data will equip users to become more informed advocates for all children and especially for vulnerable children.”