“Where data and communities come together to support Baltimore’s young people.”
What is the Baltimore City Youth Data Hub?
The Baltimore City Youth Data Hub (the Youth Data Hub) is an integrated data system that links data across youth-serving organizations into an anonymous system subject to community oversight and strict guidelines. The Youth Data Hub exists to improve quality of life outcomes for young people in Baltimore City. It was codified in 2022.
The Youth Data Hub brings communities, providers, policymakers and researchers together in partnership to make informed decisions as they create and implement programs and policies designed to eliminate disparities and achieve equitable outcomes for the success of Baltimore’s youth and families.
With the Youth Data Hub, stakeholders can better understand interrelated needs of communities and compare services and outcomes across groups by gender, race/ethnicity, place, and program-specific subpopulations to address inequities in resources and opportunities.
The Youth Data Hub will offer a more secure and efficient way for agencies to share data that will help inform policy decisions and program design and better address the diverse needs of the community.
Founding Partners
How Did We Get Here?
Our Commitment to Racial Equity
Baltimore's Promise is committed to centering and operationalizing the work of racial equity throughout our initiatives, organizational policies and practices and our approach to collective impact. This approach supports a better and more holistic understanding of the barriers and challenges faced by Baltimore City's young people and their families on the path to post-secondary success. A comprehensive understanding of these issues will provide the needed foundation to best understand the systemic impediments that must be acknowledged and addressed.
With this commitment, Baltimore's Promise and its partners approached the development of the Baltimore City Youth Data Hub with an intentional focus on creating a data use process that centers community voice and embeds racial equity.
Guiding Principles
Baltimore’s Promise recognizes the ways that data can be used to exacerbate harm in communities that have been historically disadvantaged. As such, the Youth Data Hub’s founding partners are committed to the following principles to guide the operation and implementation of the Baltimore City Youth Data Hub:
Quality data analysis can only be achieved with an understanding of historical context and competence.
Transparency and community trust building are key priorities of data governance, sharing and use.
The Data Hub will focus on improving system level program efficiencies and service coordination, not on individual participants.
Data will be used to highlight and eliminate racial disparities and inequities.
Data use will be ethical, transparent, and enforce high standards of privacy.
What Can We Do with the Baltimore City Youth Data Hub?
The Baltimore City Youth Data Hub will generate user-friendly public data sources such as reports, interactive dashboards, and maps that will help community stakeholders understand the complex, interconnected issues facing children and families in the city and design programs that better meet the needs of youth and families in Baltimore.
Youth Data Hub partners and community stakeholders collaborate on “use cases” — demonstration projects that link data from multiple agencies — to address issues that are important to the community. For example, The Baltimore Summer Engagement Ecosystem (SEE) data-integration project is a collaborative effort to inform our understanding of gaps in summer opportunities and provide intelligence for planning more equitable programs to serve youth in Baltimore. By integrating data from SEE partners, we will have unduplicated counts of the participation of Baltimore City children and youth in summer programs.