12 Signs you’re doing Data for Good
Quick Q:
If an email (or social post) drops on December 31st… does anyone read it?
Asking for a friend.
And not a ChatGPT friend. An actual friend.
But it IS a noisy month, isn’t it? Especially the first 3 weeks.
The 4th week — a little more serene.
And with that in mind, I share with you the Data for Good year end message.
From a place of serenity.
Because it’s been a year.
If you look at this National Post published poll, you’d gather that most everyone (in Canada) is feeling pretty good.
If you look at the Toronto Star front page today, you’d wonder how we even made it through.
Permacrisis, and all.
2022 — it’s been a year.
And in that year, DfG-Toronto rebirthed itself!
The YYZ crew formed a fresh, new leadership team and hosted social events for all its volunteers and community members to enjoy.
Friends at 1 Roof Garden Lane generously offered their community space for the first event and opened up their spectacular space for ongoing collaboration. We can’t thank Serena and Max enough!
Looking ahead, YYZ plans to partner with wonderful local organizations like Toronto Cares, Nisa Homes & The National Zakat Foundation, The Sick Kids Foundation, Islamic Relief, Statistics Canada, Go Open Data, and the Canadian Urban Libraries Council.
We want to thank all of our community members and volunteers who reached out to us to share their time and expertise, who attended our events, and who continue to support DfG work, post-Covid. We celebrate all of Canada’s DfG Chapters for the impressive 2022 they’ve had and we look forward to a bright 2023!
YYC (and Calgary, in general) continue to thrive and share a lot of that positive energy with the country.
The DfG-YYC team launched three Micro Project Cohorts; completed two partner projects with Alberta Law Foundation and the Canadian Cultural Mosaic Foundation; Held a Meetup every month of the year showcasing projects, organizations, and initiatives for social good; Featured and Celebrated our volunteer Joan Vlasschaert — leader of one of the first successful Micro Projects.
For next year, DfG-Calgary are looking forward to running a #DataThon with an exciting new partner! Stay tuned…
Waterloo Region started us all off with our 1st #DataThon of the year!
In January 2022, Waterloo Region partnered with Global Count for our first and only (ever) ‘international’ DataThon.
Honourable mentions go out to our partners for the virtual events this year — Statistics Without Borders & GO Open Data — and thank you to all our DfG Volunteers and Data Ambassadors for their hard work and endless patience!
Special welcome to Tamrah Edwards and Sonam Motiani to our leadership team, with gratitude to Jeffrey Baer, Melissa Kristensen, Sasha Ali-Hosein, and volunteers Khush Bhavsar, Sepehr Sepehri, Fransisca Fortes, Helena Yu and Brendon Paul for making everything in 2022 possible. Onwards!
Regina didn’t mess around this year and churned out some impressive results:
Right out of the gate, a geospatial project with the Regina Food Bank helped evaluate various delivery models for the community.
DfG-Regina evaluated accessibility by transportation method and income level in different quadrants throughout the city. Our work, in conjunction with other planning efforts, resulted in the food bank moving forward with a new food hub location.
The Regina Chapter also worked hand-in-hand with the City and the Mayor of Regina to facilitate large scale conversations with other community organizations to address safety and well-being within Regina — specifically around 6 areas of priority: domestic violence, food insecurity, substance use, race and discrimination, and safety.
Special recognition and thanks to Kody Rogers for getting our Meetups running nicely. He’s an all-star and a great dude. Likewise, Heidi Ambramyk — our comms person is awesome and amazing. We would be remiss if we didn’t thank CAYK.ca for the fancy new DfG website and for the persistent commitment to supporting DfG’s digital needs.
And from Chapter Lead, Kevin Hayes: “This sounds self-serving, but I value all the other chapters and their openness to talk about successes and challenges. I find our leadership community to be wonderful, supportive, and inspiring. Big shout outs to Joy, Victor and Geoff for being the solid foundation that allows us to do work that provides meaning and mastery along with the autonomy to forge ahead in ways that drive impact.”
The Maritimes want to especially THANK two key volunteers this year:
Edward Ma for his consistent support on the client database for the Sackville Area Warming Centre and Topsy Kiakubu for stepping up to lend project management and chapter strategy support. Bravo!
DfG-YHZ is full of gratitude for partner organizations Canadian Mental Health Association, Engage Nova Scotia, and Sackville Area Warming Centre for the opportunity to collaborate in 2022. And to our chapter leads and volunteers, we are looking forward to exciting projects in 2023!
Wait, back to the west coast and YVR — Let’s recap what happened in Vancouver this year:
DfG-YVR launched our Earth Day #DataThon in 2022 where we experimented with a new model of team formation based on similar skill-sets and found that the DfG volunteers were very engaged, resulting in many actionable insights for the City of New Westminster.
DfG-YVR also launched our own Microproject initiatives in 2022! Our volunteers collaborated with Brightside Homes to generate insights. The team had an opportunity to present to Brightside and we’re exploring avenues to take the project forward in to 2023.
We’d like to thank the City of New Westminster for helping us co-host our #DataThon, Brightside Homes for being expedient with data sharing protocols, and our fellow DfG-Calgary Chapter for sharing their experiences and helping us initiate our own Microprojects.
We’ve generated a survey to assess volunteer needs, created a framework for outreach, established relationships with more than 15 new non-profits and initiated a ‘coffee chat’ to help networking professionals in data science. All in all, a productive year!
Ottawa (YOW) & Edmonton (YEG) are in post-pandemic rebuild phases and that’s exciting!
If you’re physically near these spots, and you specifically want to take on leadership role(s), then reach out to find out more. Let’s connect in 2023
Montreal, tell us your secrets. The National Post survey says you’re the happiest:
“Almost 85 per cent of Montrealers are happy.” We’ll take that quote and ruthlessly extrapolate it to “85 per cent of DfG-YUL volunteers” are ALSO happy to have worked on two long-term projects this year:
The first long-term project supported Quebec shelters for women. DfG-YUL provided insights around the shelters’ users, the socio-economic situations of the women and their physical locations across Quebec, all to support the betterment of service delivery.
DfG-YUL’s second project helped an umbrella organization providing literacy-related services for anglophones and allophones of the province.
The team created a data collection tool to better understand the different organizations being represented across Quebec.
For 2023, we predict we will find new partner organizations to help and present some micro-projects based on open datasets. We also want to take this opportunity to thank all our volunteers over this year as our 2022 achievements would not have been possible without you. Happy New Year, Everyone!
And last but certainly not least, our inspiration, DataKind, celebrated 10 Years of “using data in the service of humanity” with a #DataDive and so much more.
So, it has been quite a year. Those 12 signs are pointing to >> keep going.
Think global, act local.
We love you.
