The Equity Center and the University of Virginia Library seek to work with the community to build the foundation of a collaborative Regional Equity Atlas for the Charlottesville region. Equity Atlases visualize data related to disparities in education, transportation, health, and other areas of social well-being to “illuminate a community’s geography of opportunity” – in partnership with the UVA Equity Center, Albemarle County Office of Equity and Inclusion, and a coalition of leaders throughout the region, we’ve been building a prototype here: https://commpaslab.shinyapps.io/cville-region/. Through this Request for Proposals, we would love your partnership in adding to it, or to offer support in the development of other synergistic equity-focused, community-driven projects that build the community’s capacity to gather, use, and share data related to regional inequities.

What: Grants of $10,000 to support work that will lead to open, shared information and data related to equity in our communities. Information and data may be qualitative or quantitative, current or historic. Spatial data (data that can be mapped) is of particular interest to the project, but not a requirement for this grant.

Who can apply: Community-based and non-profit organizations or independent researchers in Charlottesville and the surrounding counties are eligible to apply.

Purpose: Grants are intended to collect, contribute, document, and use community- (or organizationally-) generated data and information resources that will help citizens, organizations, activists, and decision makers promote greater equity in the greater Charlottesville region: the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle, Greene, Orange, Louisa, Fluvanna, Buckingham, Nelson, Augusta and Rockingham Counties.

Data and information might speak to racial, social, economic or environmental inequities, or any dimension that generates unfair differences in the ability of some groups of people to thrive in our communities. Community-based and non-profit organizations or independent researchers in Charlottesville and the surrounding counties are eligible to apply.

Examples of relevant work could include:

• Publicly identifying existing data sources – internally generated, openly available, or collected by other organizations – that an organization or group could use to address questions of equity;

• Appropriately formatting and documenting organizationally- or community-generated data and making it open and available to the public;

• Creatively using existing or publicly-available data sources to address inequities, including documenting and sharing the work publicly;

• Collaboratively generating new data or service inventories, which could be made public, to meet an articulated service gap;

• Developing documentation and supporting information for commonly used existing data sources to enable use by others;

• Drafting an open data plan for an organization, i.e., what data could you share, in what formats, with what restrictions.

Reporting outcomes:

• Midterm Reporting: We will schedule a meeting to discuss progress.

• Final Report: using any media you choose, you will need to share the outcomes of your work. along with a final budget showing how you used funds.

Please direct questions to: TheEquityCenter@virginia.edu

Deadline to apply is December 1, 2020

Apply Here