This blog is by Thomas Bennett, a member of the UNC MPA research team collecting data for the Diversity Dashboard in North Carolina. Meet his colleague Mimi Clemens in the first blog post in this series.
My name is Thomas Bennett and I am a first-year MPA student at UNC Chapel Hill. The MPA team and I have been working hard to prepare for the 2019 Diversity Dashboard Survey launch and the day is here!
If you check your inboxes, you should have an email from myself, Sarah, Mimi, or Maddie and we would greatly appreciate your participation in this ELGL initiative.
The survey has been distributed to all 100 counties in North Carolina and at least one city/town/municipality in each county, where possible.
The ELGL Diversity Dashboard is a survey designed to collect demographic information on the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) or Assistant Chief Administrative Officer (ACAO) of local government organizations throughout the United States and Canada.
As future government leaders, we want to discover if local governments are becoming more diverse and representative of the communities they represent. ELGL will be collecting demographic data, specifically on the gender, race, age, and veteran status of these local government leaders.
While ELGL will be collecting data on local governments at a broader scale, the UNC MPA Research Team will be analyzing the North Carolina data specifically and providing a report on the diversity of local governments in North Carolina, including if there are any changes compared to the previous year.
Our final report will include growing trends, local governments that have changed compared to last year, and reports on how organizations are using position recruitment or diversity, equity, and inclusion training in North Carolina.
This survey would not have been possible without Jay Dawkins and PublicInput.com. PublicInput.com is a community engagement software company that specializes in better connecting governments to the communities they serve.
Founded by a group of transportation engineers and planners, PublicInput believes that by making your community engagement initiatives more representative of the community and making access to local governments easier for citizens, local governments can build stronger relationships with their citizens on a strong foundation of trust.
Jay helped to redesign the online survey so it’s more user-friendly and intuitive than the 2018 version, and have done a phenomenal job.
If you received an email from us and are not an ELGL member, that’s not a problem! Membership is not required to complete the 2019 Diversity Dashboard Survey or view the final data we collect.
All data will be compiled and shared without personal information attached to an OpenGov dashboard, where you can view the data in maps, charts, and graphs to better visualize the findings.
If you’d like to become an ELGL member or would like more information about all the benefits an ELGL membership provides, visit https://elgl.org/membership for more information.
We hope you participate in this year’s survey and view our final data in late April. If you are a local government leader in North Carolina, but did not receive an email, you can still participate! Head over to diversitydashboard.org and click on “Take the 2019 Survey”. We’ll be back soon with more updates.