The Rural Child Well-being Data Dashboards

Save the Children, a recognized global leader in supporting childhood development, concentrates our U.S. work in the most rural and under-resourced areas, where economic barriers are intensified for children by limited resources and geographic isolation. We advocate, build coalitions, and implement early education programming and wraparound supports for America’s rural children and families.

Save the Children created the Rural Child and Family Well-being Data Dashboards in collaboration with the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, at Columbia University; and Tekja, a data visualization studio based in London, in order to provide data-based answers to fundamental questions about Rural America. To accurately tell the story of the communities where we work, we bring together data on ALL rural children. We use a definition of “rural” that captures children who live in rural pockets of extensive metropolitan counties, rather than one of the more commonly used county-level definitions of rural that’s easier to apply, but can be misleading. This assures we prioritize the full range of rural communities that can benefit from targeted investment, and the higher-quality data and resulting dashboard proves to be a versatile, intuitive information-sharing platform for our collaborators, researchers, policy analysts and others.

More detail about our methodological approach can be found here.

For questions, please contact Anita Drever, adrever@savechildren.org