In short order, Katie Kalvoda and her small team at Advance OC produced a digital map that illustrated concentrations of county residents most at risk for the virus. With a palette of yellows, greens, and blues, the map translated data for factors that increase vulnerability to the disease, including health conditions (diabetes, cancer, etc.) and living and economic circumstances (crowded housing, lack of health insurance, etc.). The result? A portrait of Orange County that made health disparities obvious in a glance. As a coup de grâce, Advance OC also identified houses of worship, Latino groceries, senior centers, and other high-traffic community spots where the mobile vans could set up.
That map is just one example of the “equity in action” that Kalvoda promotes in a mission born of personal experience and her career. She arrived in the United States as a toddler who had spent 13 months in a Malaysian refugee camp after her family fled her home country following the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War. The family’s first stop in America was a New Orleans public housing project.
College at the University of California at Berkeley and her proclivity at solving data riddles — “I get a kick out of understanding complex things and distilling them to take out the secret sauce” — led to a career in finance and the founding of her own investment management company. But about five years ago, she retired from the business and threw herself into work to advance equity in Orange County, her new home.
She created Advance OC after recognizing that data often drove conversations when government or philanthropy gathered to address problems in the county. Frequently, however, the data wasn’t analyzed with the detail to show marginalized groups of people, whom she says are often invisible in a county where the median price for resale homes is nearly $1 million.
At the outset, the group talked with dozens of nonprofit and government agencies to identify the data needed to drill below the county’s often-rosy top-line numbers. In just a few months, it created a map with 55 indicators modeled on the Global Index, which measures social progress annually in more than 160 countries. A few clicks reveal such disparate data as access to grocery stores, violations of federal water regulations, and third-grade proficiency in language arts for the county’s 580 census-tract neighborhoods.
That original map now captures data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the 2020 U.S. Census as well as other information on social and economic conditions that relate to health. Advance OC is talking with foundations and government agencies about overlays of additional data. It has already advised county officials on how to spend Covid-19 relief funds and tackle issues related to housing and homelessness, environmental justice, educational disparities, and more.
Data analysis is critical to any social-justice strategy, Kalvoda argues. Data can help advocates identify what problems to attack and where to create the most change for those who most need it.
“This is equity in action,” she says. “It is not just talking about equity.” Philanthropy, she says, too often embraces audacious goals like eradicating poverty without a data-driven plan of attack. “We can’t talk about it like that anymore. We have to take it in bite-size pieces and do something that shows progress over time.”
NBCLX television news reports on the equity map that Katie Kalvoda developed for Orange County, Calif.
