Leveraging data and multisector collaboration to reduce health impacts from heat.

Leveraging data and multisector collaboration to reduce health impacts from heat.

“Over a hundred people a year die in Maricopa Country from heat-related problems,” says Chuck Redman, co-director of the Healthy Urban Environments Initiative (HUE) and founding director of ASU’s School of Sustainability. “No one has to die from heat — this isn’t something we don’t have a cure for.”

While we may have cures for heat-related illness, administering them amidst rising temperatures and increasing energy costs has proven challenging. Like KER, HUE is taking a collaborative, data-driven approach to fostering heat resilience in Maricopa County.

“This project is all about bringing people from diverse approaches together to talk with the practitioners who are out trying to make a difference in communities,” says Redman.

Both budding initiatives at ASU, HUE and KER are using complementary strategies that hold great promise for developing larger collaborations in the future. As HUE started focusing on partnerships with municipalities to address the challenge of urban heat, KER has begun this work by engaging nonprofits like Salvation Army and many others. The two initiatives will be working closely, sharing insights, and co-funding joint activities to bring these sectors together around solutions.

“Nonprofits historically have always leveraged data to help move the mission, but many are limited in regards to their ability to interpret these insights, outside of what you would provide to a funder,” says Jowan Thornton, director of social services for Salvation Army’s Southwest Headquarters.

Thornton and his team provided KER with data on where those applying for utility assistance live and where they need to travel to submit applications and be interviewed for the assistance. Our research team spent many hours together with their crew, observing and discussing the systems and what the data represented.

We soon realized that their data could help us identify leverage points for change, an opportunity to reduce families’ burdens in accessing resources to stay resilient. Our analysts then optimized their intake system, reorganizing the locations of where people went for interviews by using addresses instead of zip codes.

“It was informative, but more importantly it allowed us to minimize the economic toll — travel, childcare, being vulnerable in the heat — for our population,” notes Thornton.

Optimizing the intake system has the potential to save residents 30% in travel time to appointments and 32% in related transportation costs.

“It really moved our whole program in a way that allowed us to be data-informed, to really look at the trends and to have that pathway of support if we had some deep, dirty data that we had to navigate through,” says Thornton.

Following this work, Thornton worked with KER to draft our first community co-authored paper, Articulating strategies to address heat resilience using spatial optimization and temporal analysis of utility assistance data of the Salvation Army Metro Phoenix.

The KER framework.

I was just so excited to be in a space where ideas were being shared and that there was the psychological safety to actually talk about the things we see as service providers and to have that be validated and listened to.

— Jowan Thornton, Director of Social Services, Salvation Army Southwest Divisional Headquarters