Leading on Opportunity

Project Ideas with Leading on Opportunity

Social capital indicator identification project

• The goal of this project would be to survey (1) the literature on social capital, (2) review Charlotte-Mecklenburg community reports and documents and (3) assess data availability to identify potential indicators for annual/biennial reporting on the state of social capital. A particular focus would be on (1) leveraging the recent opportunity insights reports on social capital published in Nature and (2) pushing beyond typical “civic engagement” measures such as 311 requests, census response rates, voter turnout, municipal board participation, arts involvement, etc. No fieldwork would be required for this project as scoped.

• A possible extension of this project requiring fieldwork would be to work with two members of the LOO team to conduct a series of interviews with community stakeholders and integrate those findings into the final report.

• April delivery would be ideal.

Policy analysis project 1: ARPA

• The goal of this project would be to track down all “Covid relief dollars” allocated in our community from public sources and track where they went. We are aiming at something like this from the Chicago Community Trust, although it does not need to be a dynamic dashboard. A simple PowerPoint or document report would be fine. This project would not require any fieldwork.

Policy analysis project 2: ECE

• The same scope/goals of the above, but focused on early care and education. We are particularly interested in funding for different kinds of programs (Meck Pre-k, NC Pre-k, Bright Beginnings). Specific research questions could be scoped with Tonya Jameson.

Data science for affordable housing project

• We are looking to use real estate data to reverse engineer the kind of analytics model used by institutional investors to acquire single family housing units (here’s a list of all corporate owned properties by price range to identify companies to benchmark). Once this model is built we’d like to add other layers of social data on economic mobility, policy enablers, and displacement risk to build a novel model that could be employed by affordable housing organizations. This project may require purchasing data, funding could be identified.

• Would likely not require fieldwork. Anytime in 2023.