Self-Healing Communities Build on Data-Driven Collaboration

What Is a Self-Healing Community?

A self-healing community is a city or locality that uses data and cross-sector collaboration to spot residents and neighborhoods facing adversity early, then coordinate targeted services and resources to improve their well-being and strengthen community resilience over time.

With disaggregated data by zip code, census tract, race and ethnicity, or age, “you can really focus your attention, your resources, and your investments into those communities that are underserved,” says Lourdes Aceves, director of health and well-being at the National League of Cities. “This ensures that community needs aren’t overlooked, that they aren’t masked by aggregated data.”

As cities look to improve in areas such as life expectancy, walkability and access to green space, “data tells you who is left behind,” says IEEE Senior Member Tejas Padliya.

“You can use data to identify disparities like income or housing stability or food security. It helps you identify the gaps, and your responses can be very targeted to the people who need them most,” Padliya says. “It also helps service providers and funders to provide measurable impact and to reallocate resources as needed.”

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How Does a Data-Driven Approach Help To Build Resilience?

The aim of a self-healing strategy is to build community resilience. Data-driven decision making is key to that effort.

“Resilience is about more than just bouncing back from a shock, whether that be federal funding cuts or a natural disaster,” Aceves says. “Resilience is about anticipating, it’s about planning, it’s about mobilizing and adjusting. Data gives you the grounding.”

Quantifiable information is essential here.

“Without the data, you risk your decisions being anecdotal, and you may miss the mark,” she says.

As an example, Aceves points to Chicago’s use of a data platform to compile neighborhood-level insights on lead exposure, asthma triggers and housing instability. Here, technology has helped the city prioritize inspections, coordinate interventions and target resources toward residents at greatest risk.

In support of greater resilience, the right data can help city leaders get ahead of emerging issues. “A self-healing community detects stress early,” Padliya says.

“It leverages local networks like neighbors or faith or groups, along with solutions and data,” he says. This, in turn, builds community resilience, with “better jobs, housing retention and even health outcomes.”

How Does Technology Enable Smarter, Faster Collaboration?

A self-healing community relies on collaboration between government, residents, nonprofits and other stakeholders. The right technology can support those vital connections.

When systems are siloed, “it’s not collaborative, and it increases frustration. It contributes to reducing trust in the city as a reliable service provider,” Aceves says. Cities need solutions that connect data across agencies and that ease communications between residents and city agencies.

Resilience requires “a technology platform to provide a common point, a common referral system for the city, so that if there is a child welfare visit that and they observe home health hazard conditions, that same person who is there to visit a child could say, ‘Hey, there seems to be a mold problem. You should come address that,’” she says.

The right technology can provide “a common, shared dashboard between all of those stakeholders, like agencies and nonprofits. That data becomes a common language between all of them, so that they can provide better services without just guessing,” Padliya says.

“That can include dashboards to monitor particular challenges that you are trying to solve, be it a housing crisis or poverty,” he says. Ideally, “you can have a citywide dashboard that all the agencies can access.”

In support of collaboration, “dashboards and centralized platforms are key to bringing together multiple stakeholders — government agencies, community groups, service providers, residents, everyone,” Aceves says.

The National League of Cities, for example, has undertaken a project on home health hazards such as lead and mold called the Healthy Housing Innovation Cohort. “It pairs cities with technology providers to build technology platforms to improve delivery to residents, so that if residents have a problem, they’re not having to visit six different sites and talk to six different people,” she says.

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What Are Best Practices for a Resilience-Focused Data Strategy?

A number of best practices can help cities to develop and implement a data strategy that supports resilience through self-healing.

“You need to start with the community,” Aceves says. “A coastal community experiencing the impact of climate change is very different from a big city with major traffic problems. What well-being means to people in those communities is very different.”

Once you’ve defined the specific pain points, “select a manageable set of metrics so you can track everything,” she says. “Pick five to seven indicators that you can follow over time, that are meaningful, that are actionable for a city. That could be life expectancy or the child poverty rate. If there are metrics you can pull, that would be helpful. But make it manageable: Don’t look at 50 metrics.”

To begin building resilience, Padliya suggests, take that manageable set of measures and apply it to one highly targeted use case. “You want to start first with a small list of high-value indicators that can be tied to clear goals,” he says.

From there, cities should take steps to ensure that their data-driven resilience efforts unfold securely. “Once you start building those systems, you have to embed governance, creating visibility while respecting privacy,” Padliya says.

To bring all of this to life, cities need to put in place “data systems that can be shared across departments, so that your health department knows what your police department is doing, knows what your public works department is doing,” Aceves says. In a self-healing community, “this is absolutely critical to ensuring the well-being of your residents: No one department should be holding the data.”