The Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation partnered with the U.S. Department of Education to collaborate on the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which aims to create more opportunities for minority men and boys.

The Beeck Center held two meetups prior to an Aug. 2 data jam, during which a wide array of community members were presented with data and tasked with highlighting problems in the community and finding solutions to the problems at hand.

“There are people now who are taking data and creating narratives around the data in really unique and interesting ways, so it’s not just a pie chart. They’re creating something that’s updating live, and there’s data being constantly fed into it,” Program Manager for Innovation and New Media Z. Michael Wang (MSB ’07), who works for the Beeck Center, said. “And I think our goal is to say, ‘These data sets were just released a couple months ago, so what we can do with it is still really new.’”

President Barack Obama launched the MBK initiative in February 2014 with the aim to build on pre-existing community efforts to combat the economic and social disparities between white males and males of color. For example, according to a White House press release, 86 percent of black boys and 82 percent of Hispanic boys are reading at levels below proficiency by the fourth grade, a marked increase from the 58 percent of white boys reading below proficiency levels by that age.

Beeck Center Executive Director Sonal Shah stressed the importance of data visualization, or imagining creative ways to interpret data and statistical correlations, that apply to society at large. The MBK data jam examined statistics taken from poor communities, such as distance to higher-paying jobs and possible correlations between violence and job training.

“You can’t solve what you can’t see. The data jam and visualization will help us look at the available data and information to help us better visualize and assess the data to see if we might be missing something,” Shah wrote in an email prior to the event.

Of the preceding meetups, one involved the Georgetown community and one involved members of the D.C. community. For the data jam, the center aimed to bring together a diverse group of individuals from both within and outside of the Georgetown community in order to foster new ideas from a variety of unique perspectives.

“To the testament of the people who have shown up, we’ve had everyone from K-12, principals of charter schools, administrators of universities to data scientists,” Wang said. “We’ve reached out to a lot of the community to get people who would normally not be involved, who would never come to an education-focused problem solving session. I think diversity was a big focus, to try and really bring in different perspectives.”

Programming and Assessment Analyst Alex Skarzynski (SFS ’15) said that the event perfectly epitomized the message and purpose behind the Beeck Center, which was founded this year.

“[It] is a great sort of idea that is, how do we have this old problem, the fact that there is this great disparity and disadvantages for boys and men of color, and how do you take a new solution to that, which is, let’s take this big data and let’s see how we can find new solutions out of it,” he said. “It allows people to be a little more innovative, and it allows people to re-examine and relook at all these sorts of things. So it’s very much part of our ethos of finding these new solutions to old problems.”

According to Wang, as an added incentive, the best ideas generated during the data jam session will be presented to Deputy Secretary of Education Jim Shelton 30 to 45 days after the event.

He said he hopes that the session can result in new ideas and interesting data visualizations in response to the provided federal data, which will help jumpstart the enactment of new policies that will put these ideas in action.

“I always jokingly compare it to the yellow arrow in Mario Kart. It’s not the end of the race, it supercharges how fast you’re going,” Wang said. “We hope this day is a supercharger that inspires teams to work together over a 30 or 45 day period where they continue to put together a more refined data visualization and come up with an idea.”

In order to be most effective, these initiatives need to be put into practice long-term, he said.

“Making it sustainable is the challenge at hand,” Wang said.

Shah also emphasized the importance of not only generating the ideas, but also putting them to use.

“While the data provides us better insight, it is in how we more effectively use the data to help the poor and those without access to greater opportunity that will matter,” Shah wrote.

Wang said he looked forward to the start of the semester when students would return to campus, thus bringing more energy and enthusiasm to the initiative.

“We did a lot of the planning without the students on campus but I think the biggest takeaway is that this is so early on. When all the students and grad students are back, it’s just going to be amazing,” he said.