This blog is by Sarah Hanson, a member of the UNC MPA Research Team for NC Diversity Dashboard research. The research team will share some of their findings as they work toward a final report to be issued in late Spring 2019.
My name is Sarah Hanson and I am a first-year Masters of Public Administration student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Many of you have likely received the 2019 Diversity Dashboard Survey a couple of weeks ago.
The survey was distributed to all 100 counties in North Carolina and, where possible, one locality within the county. Many thanks to those who have completed the survey. Your participation is greatly appreciated and we value your input. For those of you who have not completed the survey, there is still time to complete it. You can go to diversitydashboard.org in order to submit your responses.
For those of you who are not aware of the survey, its purpose is to collect demographic data on government leaders and their communities. ELGL would like to see the level of representativeness in local governments. Currently, the UNC MPA survey outreach work is focused on the State of North Carolina, and ELGL will assess governments throughout the United States.
The survey is still open, our team is working to assess the data that has been collected thus far. Though our research is mainly focused on the North Carolina, we have received responses from other states including Oregon, California, Alaska, Texas, and Colorado among others. We have even received a couple of responses from Australia.
One day the Diversity Dashboard could reach countries all around the world!
To give you some insight on the data we have collected and assessed thus far, majority of the responses have been from city, towns, or villages and nearly 70% of respondents come from communities with populations of more than 13,000 residents.
We will continue to further assess responses and look forward to reading more of your comments, questions, or concerns related to the Diversity Dashboard. This information can help the dashboard and survey continue to make improvements each year.
Also, for those of you who are willing to be publicly profiled for your participation, we would love to hear more from you.
Having testimonials from specific communities not only helps our research, but also makes it more personalized.
If you are willing to be interviewed by us or simply provide us with some more information of how your community values diversity in their government, please contact me at sahanson@live.unc.edu.
Thank you again for your responses. We greatly value your input and look forward to further analyzing the data and giving you a full report of our findings.