We believe all children deserve the opportunity to thrive. We also believe that when opportunity is shared equitably, everyone benefits. For children, opportunity includes the conditions and resources they need to grow up healthy and learn. This includes the resources available to their families, in the schools they attend and in the neighborhoods where they live.
In the U.S., many children live in families with economic and other resources to support them. They attend good early childhood education programs and schools and live in neighborhoods that provide access to healthy food, parks and playgrounds, clean air, safe housing and good jobs for the adults in their lives.
But many U.S. children lack these conditions. Hispanic and Black children are more likely to have lower opportunities for healthy development: they live in families and neighborhoods with much higher poverty rates and attend schools with more limited resources than White children. This inequity affects not only children but all of us.
Understanding the conditions children experience is the first step toward ensuring that all children have equitable access to the resources they need to thrive. diversitydatakids.org is a research project that examines who our children are, whether they have what they need to grow up healthy and achieve their full potential, whether social policies are well designed to improve children’s lives and how to make them better to improve equity.
Established in 2014 with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, diversitydatakids.org set out to fill an urgent need for a rigorous, equity-focused research program with a clear mission to help improve child wellbeing and increase racial and ethnic equity in opportunities for children.
We now have a thriving community of users of our research and data. We provide them with the information they need to make a positive impact through further research, community conversations about equity, and actions to change policy and allocate resources to increase equitable access to opportunity for all children.
"Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today....They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be—The unknown person inside each of them is the hope for the future."
Looking to download the raw data? Visit our data portal.
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