Event highlight: Designing for Resilience Dividends

Building economic resilience with more robust data tools

Living costs in Arizona, including housing, health care and child care, have risen dramatically in the last decade, outpacing wage increases, yet the federal poverty measure does not yet factor these essential costs into its calculation, limiting its assessment criteria to food costs alone.

It also fails to account for regional variations in the cost of living, which in Maricopa County are significantly higher than state or national averages. Depending upon this method of defining poverty means many families in need of assistance are deemed ineligible.

This year’s Designing for Resilience Dividends tackled this challenge, inviting participants to explore and provide feedback on a new data tool that attempts to address these gaps and capture the real nature of poverty.

Sarbeswar Praharaj, associate director for data and visualization for ASU's Knowledge Exchange for Resilience, presents the Household Expenditure and Income Gap Highlighter Tool — dubbed HEIGHT — to potential users at Designing for Resilience Dividends 2022.

Abby Johnson / ASU Knowledge Exchange for Resilience

Starting in 2019, KER partnered with Valley of the Sun United Way to design a unique tool to measure and visualize the true costs of living at the neighborhood scale, highlighting the emerging gap between household income and living costs.

Using federal data from multiple federal and state sources, as well as the Council for Community and Economic Research, the tool builds a living cost budget for various family sizes accounting for the costs of food, housing and utilities, health care, child care, transportation, taxes and other essential needs. Analyzing those local costs of living with the household’s income data, it determines how many households are struggling to meet basic living costs across neighborhoods.

Morgan Winburn, community garden chair for Keep Tempe Beautiful and 2022 Resilience Fellow, explores the HEIGHT Poverty Dashboard on KER's website.

Abby Johnson / ASU Knowledge Exchange for Resilience

“The data also provides insights about families with different characteristics — whether the household includes children, whether the head of household is male or female, the number of adults in the household, and the ethnicity of householders — to enable communities to design interventions targeted to their specific needs,” said Sarbeswar Praharaj, KER’s associate director for data and visualization.

By inviting potential end users from local nonprofit and private organizations, we were able not only to capture valuable input that helped us refine the tool, but also to generate interest and buy-in among stakeholders.

Explore the tool at https://resilience.asu.edu/HEIGHT-poverty-dashboard

Jowan Thornton, state director for Arizona at Unite Us, discusses the HEIGHT dashboard with other Designing for Resilience Dividends participants.

Abby Johnson / ASU Knowledge Exchange for Resilience