All Children Thrive - California: Shared data infrastructure for locally defined community questions
For California community coalitions, I proposed and built the ACT Hub to connect shared public-data resources with definitions, limitations, analytical applications, interpretation guidance, and project-specific support.
From scattered resources to a question-centered Hub
Project period: September 2025–2026
Work: Hub discovery and information architecture, user research and testing, research-data systems, GIS and interactive maps, applied analysis, interpretation-guide design, documentation, and data technical assistance
All Children Thrive supported California coalitions working on housing, homelessness, alternative response, education, environmental conditions, mental-health resources, youth spaces, and other conditions affecting children and families. Coalition teams brought local knowledge, defined the questions they wanted to pursue, and set their policy goals. My role within UCLA’s data technical-assistance program was to help translate those questions into data discovery, appropriate measures, analysis, maps, interpretation, and communication support.
Through direct technical-assistance sessions and a review of where teams were finding maps, datasets, and guidance, I identified a recurring problem: sessions often returned to locating individual variables and rebuilding basic maps, leaving less time for scale, context, limitations, and what the evidence could support.
Based on that discovery, I proposed and built a central ArcGIS Hub that combined frequently requested datasets and applications with the interpretive guidance I had otherwise been repeating during assistance sessions. The aim was to let teams explore independently and bring a more developed question into direct assistance.
A Hub organized around how questions develop
I ran the first formal testing round with five users, each working through a current project question. I asked them to locate relevant information, interpret it, and decide how they might use it. They could often find a relevant resource but were less certain about the next step; others knew the concept they wanted to investigate without knowing the dataset terminology needed to locate it.
What I observed changed the design. The first information architecture began too far downstream, so I reorganized the Hub around a progression: Find → Understand → Analyze → Communicate. Data and maps remained available, but I connected them to definitions, limitations, comparisons, analytical guidance, and communication resources.
I designed the progression so each part of the Hub would lead into the next. A coalition could begin with a dataset or map, encounter definitions and limitations alongside it, explore comparisons or mapped patterns, and then carry the result into questions and guidance for discussion.
One analysis guide made that path concrete. I paired a school-performance map with “What the Pattern Suggests,” then structured the guide to move from a visible association into questions about schools, neighborhoods, other explanations, and possible action. The red-dot pattern becomes a starting point for interpretation and communication rather than a conclusion standing on its own.
After the revision, four users completed the full path. All 14 coalitions had access, and five active teams returned to the Hub beyond testing.
The combined-variable map became the Hub’s most-used component. As teams could examine several conditions before a session, the requests I received became less about finding a single variable and more about comparison and interpretation. In City Heights, for example, a housing-cost question expanded into demographic change, community history, collective efficacy, and community bonds.
Across the engagement, I produced more than 35 layers, curated datasets, maps, applications, dashboards, walkthroughs, and guides. To produce recurring Census-based maps for the guides more efficiently, I wrote a reusable Python workflow; one preparation task fell from about four hours to about 30 minutes.
The ACT project period closed in 2026. I documented the Hub’s information architecture, production routines, and analytical guidance so they were not dependent on continued operation of the public deployment.
Stockton: comparing youth and city-selected parks
An earlier city-aligned process had identified park-renovation candidates using income, rent burden, environmental conditions, green-space access, and other ParkServe priorities. Youth participants did not recognize many as parks they used. They assessed alternatives through their own knowledge of use, safety, broken facilities, tree planting, lighting, access, and other local conditions.
The youth and project team then asked how their selections compared with the ParkServe priority-area layer used in the earlier process. I performed that comparison using 10-minute walksheds. The youth-selected parks overlapped the layer by 67 percent, 92 percent, and 91.3 percent; the city-selected parks overlapped it by 78.3 percent and 72.4 percent. Two youth values exceeded both city values, while one was lower.
These percentages measure spatial overlap with one priority layer, not overall park quality, and do not replace the youth assessment. I built a focused map with park walksheds, priority areas, overlap percentages, and optional context layers, then prepared guidance for presenting the comparison in policy discussions. The project developed a recommendation for a funded youth role in future renovation decisions; it had not yet been formally presented to the city at the time of this account.
