While the word data often brings to mind spreadsheets, dashboards, and reporting requirements, we believe the most important role of data is helping us better understand people, relationships, experiences, and systems. When used thoughtfully, data can help organizations move beyond assumptions, identify emerging needs, strengthen strategy, communicate impact, and make more informed decisions.
The Great Lakes Community Review Board has officially begun its first pilot protocol application review process, marking an important early step in advancing more community-led approaches to research ethics, accountability, and participation.
Many collaborative efforts fail—not because the people involved lack commitment or skill, but because they are operating from a limited frame. When collaboration is built on a siloed or program-centered perspective, it often focuses too narrowly on individual organizational goals, isolated metrics, or short-term outputs. The result is coordination without meaningful change.
Over the past several years, access to timely, usable eviction data has been inconsistent. Dashboards have gone offline, stopped updating, or lacked the level of detail needed to understand what’s actually happening across neighborhoods. Without clear data, it becomes harder to respond—harder to target support, shape policy, or even see the full scope of housing instability.
At a time when many institutions are retreating from complexity, some are choosing to move toward it with intention.
The Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis is one of these intentional institutions.
In the face of rising polarization, intensified immigration enforcement, and increasing forms of state-directed harm impacting vulnerable communities, the Diocese is taking a deliberate step toward strengthening how its commitments translate into coordinated, informed, and effective action that strategically uses its many assets to strengthen their solidarity with Hoosiers living on the front lines of precarity.
This spring, they have invited City Rising to serve as a social impact partner for Mutual Aid & Direct Action: A Strategic Formation Series for Clergy.
