Post From Community: Area nonprofits get help using data to improve programs and services | Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service
Dr. Victor Amaya, Executive Director, Data You Can Use
December 22, 2022
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(Milwaukee, WI, December 21, 2022) –  Today, Data You Can Use (DYCU), a Milwaukee-based nonprofit research group, announced four winners of their annual Data Dream Awards. The Data Dream Award provides pro-bono services to help charitable organizations gather and interpret data to improve the effectiveness of their programs and services.
Winners of the 2022 Data Dream Awards include the Center for Urban Teaching, the Dominican Center, Peace Learning Center of Milwaukee, and UniteWI. Each award is sponsored by an area foundation who underwrites the cost of services. The 2022 Data Dream Awards were underwritten by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, Northwestern Mutual Foundation, Siebert Lutheran Foundation and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.
Data You Can Use will fulfill the Data Dreams in partnership with colleagues at the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute. Winners were selected through a competitive process and vetted by a panel of expert judges in data sciences, nonprofits, and philanthropy.
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“Having the right data and understanding available data, can help nonprofits take their work from transactional to transformational.  Data You Can Use is honored to help these exceptional organizations explore and learn in ways that help them better improve the quality of life for people in the Milwaukee area.” said Victor Amaya, Executive Director of Data You Can Use.
Winners of the 2022 Data Dream Awards include the following organizations and projects.
Finalists for the Data Dream Awards presented their projects at Data Day on October 19, an annual conference for leaders, from neighborhoods to universities, who want to better understand the implications of data on community revitalization, and to increase connections between research and practice. The event was held at Northwestern Mutual’s Cream City Labs in partnership with the Data Science Institute. More information on Data Day 2022 can be found on the Data You Can Use website at https://www.datadaymke.org.
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About Data You Can Use: Data You Can Use is a Milwaukee-based nonprofit organization. We help people access data and make it useful in improving community conditions. We help connect people who need data to people who have data and assist in accessing, analyzing, translating, interpreting, and presenting data. We can help you ask the right questions to get the right data, put it into a local context, present it visually and put it to work in addressing issues important to you. We subscribe to the principles of the Urban Institute’s National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and work to democratize data by building local capacity, sharing best practices, and helping users sort through the data to surface, explain and address issues of concern. We know this requires technical expertise, knowledge of local context, the ability to convene and collaborate with multiple stakeholders and trust.