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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.

“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.

• The Center for Urban Teaching (CFUT) focuses on identifying, preparing, and supporting high-performing urban teachers, leaders, and schools. The Center for Urban Teaching Data Dream will help them assess teacher needs in Milwaukee and in other Wisconsin Districts and inform colleges and universities can do to target to meet that need.

• Dominican Center: Serving Milwaukee’s Amani neighborhood, the Dominican Center works with Amani residents and partners to build a better future for everyone in the neighborhood. The Dominican Center Data Dream is to better align their organizational assessments with Amani’s broader neighborhood revitalization plan.

• Serving Southeast Milwaukee, The Peace Learning Center (PLC) focuses on lowering violence in the community through non-violent conflict management.   PLC’s Data Dream is to develop a database of more than 2000 participants and link the results to 25 existing indicators of mental wellness. Indicators that will be ranked as predictors of peacefulness include poverty, education enrollment, obesity, crime, and others.

• Helping the residents of Milwaukee and Racine with health disparities, UniteWI is dedicated to advancing the health of Wisconsin communities with a focus on COVID-19 care, hypertension, and other health conditions. UntieWI’s Data Dream is to use data to establish the importance and impact of Community Health Workers on physical and behavioral health.

Finalists for the Data Dream Awards presented their projects at Data Day on October 19^th, 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.

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