Strengthening Community Programs with Local Data in Nacogdoches, Texas

Challenge

Better Together, a community-wide cross-sectoral organization, is working to improve the mental health, health, and wellbeing of all Nacogdoches County residents. A grant-funded project, Better Together began six years ago with an aim to better engage residents in conversations about community strengths and needs, as well as upstream drivers of health and mental health. Better Together has led the Nacogdoches community in developing their Common Agenda, a set of ten comprehensive goals to focus their work around. These goals include expanding access to health care, fostering a healthy economic environment, and supporting youth social and emotional health.

Better Together has historically relied on state and county-level data to identify the strengths and opportunities facing the county, but the group recognized an additional need for local data specifically related to the city of Nacogdoches, the largest city in the county. Better Together needed neighborhood-level data to further refine its strategy and communicate more effectively with organizational leadership and volunteers.

Impact

After successfully applying to the Dashboard's 2023 Put Us on the Map Challenge, Nacogdoches, TX was added to the site—providing Better Together and the city the ability to visualize city and neighborhood-level health and equity for the first time. The organization has leveraged the Dashboard’s data visualizations, including metric maps, to nurture dialogue with community members and civic leaders, and help them contextualize challenges impacting each neighborhood in the city. The Dashboard has become an essential educational resource for Better Together, both internally within the group’s Network Advisory Board and externally via community-wide presentations, including a presentation for Nacogdoches’ United Way’s Give 5 program. The Give 5 program is a civic matchmaking program that connects retired adults with volunteer opportunities at local nonprofits. Better Together presents the City Health Dashboard’s zip code data for Income Inequality and Children in Poverty to program participants to illustrate variations in the social determinants of health across the city and help the participants uncover ways they can help make a difference in addressing social and systemic challenges. Using data to set strategies and create shared meaning around organizational and community goals, Better Together can serve as a model for communities eager to engage residents in improving health and mental health.