“PolicyMap is one of the first things I consult when I’m preparing for a speaking engagement or need quick facts about a neighborhood—especially around the populations and issues we’re advocating for.”
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Challenge
Kindred Futures’ work depends on understanding complex, place-based factors that shape wealth-building opportunities, ranging from income and housing affordability to access to resources like grocery stores, schools, and financial institutions. To effectively advocate for policy change and inform stakeholders, Kindred Future’s team needs reliable, community-level data that captures these overlapping conditions.However, accessing and analyzing this type of data can be a challenge. Key indicators are often spread across multiple sources, making it difficult to quickly gather a comprehensive view of a neighborhood or region. This creates barriers when preparing for presentations, engaging policymakers, or identifying priority areas for investment and intervention.
In addition, Kindred Futures needed a way to make data more usable, especially with consideration to helping partners and community members better understand the structural conditions shaping wealth-building opportunities.
Solution
PolicyMap provides Kindred Futures with a centralized platform to access, analyze, and visualize critical community data. The team uses PolicyMap regularly to explore indicators such as income, access to resources, and neighborhood-level disparities—often in real time to support presentations, stakeholder engagement, and policy discussions.Most notably, PolicyMap data was foundational in the development of Kindred Futures’ Mapping Pathways to Building Collective Black Wealth tool. This publicly accessible, interactive mapping platform allows users to explore how economic, environmental, health, and housing conditions shape wealth-building opportunities across the South. Organized around Kindred Futures’ R3 framework (Revenue, Resilience, and Repair), the tool helps users identify both barriers and opportunities within communities and better understand the structural drivers of wealth inequities.
The tool has been especially valuable for stakeholders, many of whom may not otherwise have access to mapping or data analysis resources. By making this information freely available and easy to navigate, Kindred Futures has expanded its ability to support community leaders, advocates, and policymakers in visualizing and addressing disparities. PolicyMap has helped Kindred Futures move beyond analysis to action, equipping a broad audience with the insights needed to advance collective Black wealth-building.