How Data Can Help Close the Racial Wealth Divide
Launched by our Greenwood Initiative, the Black Wealth Data Center’s new Racial Wealth Equity Database will serve as a resource to empower leaders who are working to ensure that data can be used to drive solutions for racial wealth equity.
Incubated by Prosperity Now, learn more in this video and below about the go-to resource for data disaggregated by race.
Garnesha Ezediaro, Greenwood Initiative at Bloomberg Philanthropies: On average, Black families in America have one-eighth the wealth of white families. We’re working to help change that with data.
Mike Bloomberg: Data allows us to get to the root of problems and uncover solutions, and data has a critical role to play in building a more equitable society. It empowers the public to demand their leaders take action, and then hold them accountable for results.
Gary Cunningham, Prosperity Now: For so long, those of us who want meaningful change haven’t had the data to support our work. The problem is, essential data that would help us uncover new ways to build wealth in Black families is out of date, inaccessible, or incomplete.
Ezediaro: To help fuel the racial wealth equity movement and harness the power of data, we joined with partners to create a new go-to data resource. It’s called the Black Wealth Data Center.
Natalie Evans Harris, Black Wealth Data Center: The Black Wealth Data Center will provide leaders with the most comprehensive data we can find to tell a fuller, more accurate story of Black wealth in this country.
Dara Eskridge, Invest STL: It’s a source of data. It’s a source for insight for people beyond just researchers, and so it’s incredibly helpful in being able to build solutions not outside of those who are impacted, but with them.
Marc Morial, National Urban League: I can look at Los Angeles or I can look at rural Mississippi to census tracts, or neighborhoods, and understand where the disparities are. This allows better economic interventions and policy interventions.
Jonathan Mintz, Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund: The Black Wealth Data Center does such an excellent job of laying out data across multiple topics in multiple ways. It’s the accessibility of this data, your ability to understand it and to manipulate it in a way that tells the story you need to tell.
Wole Coaxum, Mobility Capital Finance Inc. (MoCaFi): As a FinTech company, we are being challenged to make the case in terms of why someone should make a capital allocation, but to be able to have the data that allows us to connect all those dots is very powerful, and enables us to paint a picture that will drive more investment, to drive more innovation, to bring more people into the financial mainstream.
Bloomberg: Our goal is to give leaders the tools and data they need to speed up progress towards racial wealth equity, and to help guide our way forward.