The Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions is pleased to announce the Opportunity Youth Forum communities selected to receive grant funding under our new data capacity grant – Rural and Tribal Data Enhancement Grant. Each of the two communities will receive up to $100,000 over a three-year period through an investment from Ballmer Group.

Rural and tribal communities face significant challenges to build and maintain data capacity needed to inform better strategies to meet their communities’ needs. This grant will support rural and tribal communities to deepen their capacity to collect and analyze data reflective of their communities that will expand their ability to generate accurate, reliable information to advance equity and continuous improvement.

The two new Data Enhancement grantees are:

Hopi Opportunity Youth Initiative – The Hopi Foundation

The goal of the Hopi Opportunity Youth Initiative (HOYI)’s Data Enhancement Project is to reduce the Post-Secondary disconnection and Workforce disconnection rate among Hopi youth, ages 14 – 26, by building the capacity of HOYI staff and collaborative, specifically those partners that work with Post-Secondary and Workforce disconnection data and support services. Their Data Enhancement Project will build on their Equity Counts work by implementing the components of our Data Capacity Building plan such as but not limited to launch of a Data Intern Initiative and implementation of scale appropriate data collection tools for each workforce partner.

Del Norte County & Adjacent Tribal Lands

Del Norte’s Data Enhancement Project aims to improve its staff and partners’ capacity to address three key issues that will improve the community’s ability to use data to drive decision-making. The first is the issue of collecting relevant, high-quality data; a significant barrier for our small, rural community.  The second issue is developing and improving data collection tools.  Reliable data will improve the community’s capacity to address our third issue:  to better understand the existing data and identify other new data to drive community-level changes to improve access to employment and education for opportunity youth in Del Norte County.  Specifically, the project aims to develop a data collection tool and collect high-quality data on the postsecondary disconnection rate and the community disconnection rate in Del Norte County.