Dr. Somava Saha, President and CEO of We in the World, opened with the gap that started this whole effort. Looking across one health system’s reporting, her team found 542 measures being tracked — and only two related to screening for depression, with nothing at all on social needs. Her conclusion was blunt: “we can’t improve what we can’t see.” The deeper problem, she said, wasn’t just missing numbers, but missing voice: “if it’s of the people, by the people, for the people, where’s the voice of the people themselves?” That question became the founding premise of the Data for Power Cooperative — that communities should get to define what well-being means, and what gets measured, for themselves.

The stakes of getting this wrong showed up starkly during the pandemic. Saha described mapping three datasets side by side — where COVID cases and deaths were concentrated, where Paycheck Protection Program loans actually went, and where vaccinations reached — and the pattern was damning: “we could actually create the visuals and policy briefs that showed that we were functionally going to be redlining in our response.” In response, a coalition anchored by groups including Chromatic Black and Indigenous health leadership helped shift $30 million in funding toward the communities the data showed were being missed, creating over 11,000 jobs in the process. That work grew into a real-time survey effort that has now collected more than 45,000 responses on well-being, trust, and discrimination directly from communities — data owned by the people who provided it, not extracted from them.

That same logic is now driving very concrete decisions in healthcare. Saha described the origin of a new place-based framework this way: a health system realized it was sending medical bills into the same zip codes where it was funding community benefit programs. “Why are we trying to do community benefits if they’re also sending debt out? Why are we impoverishing the communities we’re trying to help?” she asked. “It was such a simple and powerful question.” That question is what sent the data team looking for a rigorous way to identify, block by block, where a sliding scale for financial assistance could do the most good.

That’s where Jonathan Scaccia picked up the thread. He and his team tested a measure called the Community Deprivation Index (CDI) against a range of independent indicators — social vulnerability, uninsured rates, life expectancy, medical debt — to see whether it actually tracked real disadvantage. It did: communities scoring higher on the CDI consistently showed “substantially higher social vulnerability, more uninsured residents, shorter life expectancy, higher premature mortality, and more medical debt,” and the pattern held not just in a few places but “consistent across the country, all 50 states plus territories.” Roughly a quarter of the U.S. population, he noted, lives in the communities carrying the highest level of deprivation by this measure. But he was careful about what the tool is actually for: “our goal is not to let data make decisions. It’s to give Better Ancestors a transparent, consistent framework that helps direct resources towards communities where they can make the greatest difference.”

Angela Johnson, Assistant Director of the Center for Applied Research and Engagement Systems (CARES) at the University of Missouri, closed the session with a different kind of measure entirely: civic muscle. Her team built an index — spanning belonging, contribution, leadership, and vitality — grounded in the idea that “a strong community and civic foundation enables populations to thrive.” Rather than ranking every community against every other, the tool compares each one only to genuine peers, since, as she put it, “rural communities and urban communities don’t have the same assets” and shouldn’t be judged as if they did. That index, along with the Community Deprivation Index and dozens of other measures, now lives in a free, public tool called the WIN Measures Map Room, where any community can pull its own data rather than wait for someone else to hand it down.

One line from the session’s live poll, read aloud as it came in, captured what the whole hour had been building toward: “data is commons, we own it, and it also has the power to convey our true interconnectedness.” Saha closed with the same idea in her own words: this work isn’t funded by any single grant, she said, but sustained by a group that simply asked, “what could we do together that we couldn’t do alone.” As she put it at the very end, “we can do more together than we could ever do alone.”