Our beliefs and opinions drive our actions. We mold the world in the shape of our narratives—and if our narratives define a world where some people deserve to be poor and ill, where some people are seen as lesser than others, then we’ll end up creating a world that reproduces those cruel conditions daily.

In a dynamic half-day workshop, which took place in advance of National Network of Public Health Institutes’ Open Forum, the Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH) team engaged nearly 30 public health professionals, equipping them with tools to make meaningful contributions to their organizations’ data modernization efforts.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has updated the decennial census form to more accurately capture the demographics of our country. Community-based organizations (CBOs) and public health organizations can learn from the OMB’s work and from each other when considering equitable practices for collecting demographic data.

We love expertise. It entertains us. It gives us hope. We trust it. We love expertise so much, we even quantified it: 10,000 hours of practice. That’s what it takes to become an expert. Strangely enough, there’s an important part of life where we don’t trust the experts to make decisions for us. But that might be changing in the State of Washington.

A paper co-authored by our DASH colleagues argues that public health, healthcare, and social service sectors simply need to work with communities to democratize decisions about how their data is used.

This practice report examines the nature and extent to which public health entities are sharing data across sectors in ways that are innovative and supportive of their organizational missions to promote community health equity and well-being.