Greater Houston Community Foundation (Foundation) launched Understanding Houston in November 2019, marking nearly five years of insights into our region. The last five years have been quite a journey, and many of you have been along for the ride, and we are grateful for our partners and supporters who have supported us throughout this endeavor.
Measuring what matters to do what matters
Using the data from Understanding Houston, we have learned a lot together about Houston’s three-county region.
- We know more needs to be done to build trust amongst residents and boost civic engagement in our region. Less than half of Harris County residents think “Most People Can Be Trusted,” and while voter turnout hit record numbers in the 2020 presidential election, our region and state still lag U.S. voter participation rates.
- Our diversity is a point of pride with Fort Bend County’s demographic composition being just about evenly split among the four largest racial/ethnic categories, but we still see disparities across income, home ownership, educational attainment, and health.
- Houstonians are struggling. Renters are increasingly burdened by the rising cost of housing, incomes have stagnated, and more than 1 out of 3 households in the region is not able to afford their basic needs despite working full-time.
We have shared this type of data — and more — far and wide. Over 150,000 users have visited the understandinghouston.org website and we’ve provided data briefings to over 3,700 individuals. But Understanding Houston was never meant to be only about collecting data and learning. The purpose was always meant to inform action by measuring what matters to do what matters.
Our First Three Years
Start-Up
Year 1
Engage
Year 2
Catalyze
Year 3
Build new tools
Engage community leaders across three counties to inform the project
Aggregate credible data and build the website
Launch November 21, 2019
Build capacity and convene
Host educational opportunities across sectors
Offer nonprofit partners data capacity building
Convene to identify key focus issues for collaborative action
Take action and iterate
Deepen learning through community engagement and discussion on focus issues
Develop and begin executing on key actions
Update website and reflect
Community Impact Fund
How did we evolve from Understanding Houston, a data indicators project, to action? Greater Houston Community Foundation’s Community Impact Fund. The Community Impact Fund will be a catalytic force for philanthropic impact – making a meaningful difference in the lives of Houstonians through three pillars of work that speak to data, collaboration, and lasting impact.
Understanding Houston was the first initiative that started and shaped the Foundation’s Community Impact work. By grounding ourselves in our region’s strengths and challenges through the data and community engagements, we were able to make decisions around how we should deepen our impact and show up for Houston.
This learning journey, expedited by a global pandemic and a grueling winter storm shortly after, prompted the Foundation to proactively step into a space we had already been leading in reactively. The Greater Houston Disaster Alliance officially launched May 2023 in partnership with United Way of Greater Houston and city and county leadership. This initiative allows us to strengthen our role as philanthropic first responders to support disaster recovery and partner in new ways to increase our region’s resiliency in between times of disaster.
Finally, our newest initiative, High-Impact Grantmaking where we partner with community to leverage collaborative, catalytic grantmaking to improve economic mobility for our neighbors. Through Understanding Houston data trends and engaging over a hundred community leaders, we solidified economic mobility as a priority and a paramount concern for Houston. Dive into our journey from going to 200+ indicators to one issue area of focus.
Engage in the Journey
If you want to stay informed on all our Community Impact initiatives, subscribe to the new, quarterly Insider Update newsletter. For all our data lovers out there, do not worry — while the Understanding Houston newsletter will be switching to a quarterly cadence, it isn’t going anywhere. We will continue to share data insights and trends, articles that dive into relevant and complex issues, and other resources for further learning.
So please stay with us on this evolving journey as we transition from “Measuring what matters to do what matters” to “Doing what matters by measuring what matters,” because the ride isn’t over!
As always, we would love to hear from you — please share feedback, suggestions, and success stories here.