SEAP had the opportunity to join a cohort of three community-based organizations tasked with turning data from Opportunity Insights into action — all in pursuit of a shared goal: advancing economic mobility in the places we each call home.
We set out to make national datasets more accessible and meaningful for our partners across the South. The result is Place and Progress, a dashboard built to help communities better understand how funding, need, and resilience come together to shape local opportunity.
We started with three simple but powerful questions:
Where is federal funding going?
What communities are in need?
How are communities resilient?
To explore these questions, we pulled together more than 40 datasets, including those from Opportunity Insights, to paint a clearer picture of resource allocation and community need across the country, with a particular focus on the American South. This was a chance to combine federal and non-federal data sources and build a fuller, more human story of where resources flow and where they don’t.
At first, we leaned on the federal Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) to identify communities experiencing disadvantage. When CEJST was removed by the new administration in early 2025, we didn’t want to lose that foundation. So, we gathered every publicly available dataset it had relied on — more than 30 indicators from multiple federal agencies — and built a county-level map that lets users explore their own community’s data directly.
Unlike most tools that use census tracts, Place and Progress aggregates data at the county level. That decision let us bring in additional layers like funding and resilience to tell a more complete story about both the challenges and strengths within a place.
Also unlike similar data tools, the notion of community resilience is central to Place and Progress. Too often, conversations about community need focus only on what’s missing. We wanted to look deeper by asking: what does this place already have? From local nonprofits to civic networks, these assets tell us a lot about how communities endure, adapt, and thrive.
In the end, we hope Place and Progress helps our partners — especially across the South — to:
- Explore your community’s needs through meaningful indicators;
- Easily export data about your county in a way that’s simple to use and share;
- Challenge at least one assumption you started with; and
- Advance your mission with clearer, more accessible information on funding, need, and resilience.
We believe that a deeper understanding of the South is the first step toward building lasting progress.
Place and Progress was possible thanks to support from NEO Philanthropy’s Economic Mobility and Opportunity Fund.
