Communicate More Effectively and Efficiently

Judi’s House/JAG Institute, a nonprofit in Colorado, provides support regarding childhood bereavement. In 2018, they created the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model® (CBEM) to estimate rates of children losing a parent or sibling before adulthood. Annual CBEM reports were produced, but racial and ethnic data breakdowns were lacking until 2021. Partnering with R for the Rest of Us, they generated high-quality, easy-to-understand reports on bereavement disparities by race and ethnicity. These national and state-level reports, created using parameterized reporting and RMarkdown, help advance their vision that no child should be alone in grief.

In 2020, the Partnership for Strong Communities (PSC) collaborated with Connecticut Data Collaborative (CTData) to update Housing Data Profiles for Connecticut's 169 towns and 7 counties. These reports, crucial for policymakers and developers, needed automation to replace the cumbersome manual process. PSC and CTData enlisted R for the Rest of Us to automate report generation using R. We created a customized report template and implemented parameterized reporting, resulting in visually appealing, easily updated reports that provide essential housing data insights efficiently.

In 2022, the Oregon Human Development Corporation (OHDC) set out to conduct research on the needs of farmworkers across the state. The resulting report would help shed light on issues facing this long-neglected population. R for the Rest of Us partnered with Colibri Consulting and OHDC to put together the 2022 Farmworker Needs Assessment.

The Ford Family Foundation (TFFF) aims to improve the lives of Oregon's rural residents. They conducted the Oregon Voices survey, reaching nearly 4,500 households. TFFF sought clear, easy-to-use county-level reports for the survey results. Collaborating with TFFF, we developed these reports using parameterized reporting. The reports highlight respondent demographics and their views on key issues like finances, community pride, health, education, and employment, ensuring the data is accessible and informative for each county.

The Ford Family Foundation sought to create the Oregon by the Numbers report, highlighting social and economic indicators for the state's 36 counties. Initially presented as tables of data, I transformed it into a visually appealing report, collaborating with their staff over several months. The final report effectively communicates the strengths and challenges of Oregon’s counties. Widely shared with policymakers, media, and stakeholders, it has garnered significant attention and impact.

In March 2021, Kathleen Doll from Intention2Impact collaborated with R for the Rest of Us and the Asian Pacific Islander (API) Council to map food resources for San Francisco's API community. Automating data collection with R, we used tidycensus, osmdata, and web scraping tools. We created an interactive website map for the entire city and specific neighborhoods. These maps, matching the API Council’s branding, can be easily updated with new data by re-running the R code.

Moving to R has helped the OMNI Institute dramatically improve the efficiency of their workflow, including automated data tracking and generating dozens of reports automatically.

Sustain East Africa (SEA) reached to R for the Rest of Us about developing a custom package to assist in their reporting work. The package we developed has functions to create custom tables, ggplot themes, and a custom R Markdown template, all done with SEA branding. The resulting package enables SEA to more easily and beautifully report on their results.