DSCI.SP25

Non-profits experience similar pushes and pulls toward data-driven decision making as for-profit companies do. Funding organizations and donors expect quantitative analyses of program impact and success. The digital tools that organizations use to organize clients, volunteers and donors produce data that might be analyzed. However, overshadowing both trends is a very long history of public-sphere data collection and data-driven policy-making that disenfranchised and objectified the very communities that public and charitable institutions were ostensibly helping. What might it take to reconcile data collection and data-driven decision-making with more inclusive understandings of social justice? In this course you will work and learn with staff from local non-profit organizations as they develop practices for working and making decisions with data that align with their organizational values and goals. [Image source]