Hey Friends,
As we approach the end of the year, we’re full of mixed emotions. The end of a year is normally a time for resetting, preparations, rest, and reflections. In some ways, 2020 is no different — but as we spend time reflecting, the heaviness is easy to dwell on. We’ve consciously decided to name the positive, too, as we found it easy to be consumed by the not-so-good.
This year, we’re more thankful than ever for the work of those we get to collaborate with (both directly and indirectly). We draw our inspiration from organizations and individuals who are human-focused — making people first. This might sound strange coming from a group focused on embedding data into practice…however, we feel more compelled than ever to find the humanity in the numbers — to find just as much value in the nuanced stories as large sets of data. That’s why we want to start our reflection off by talking about some awesome groups we had the opportunity to work with.
Project Highlights
We love all our clients, but we selected just a few to highlight (with their permission, of course!) and share with you. Each demonstrates a different aspect of the work we’re so proud to be part of. We know you’ll enjoy learning more about each of them as much as we love working with them.
The Arizona End of Life Care Partnership (EOLCP), anchored at the United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona, is a collective our team has the opportunity to work with on an ongoing basis. The EOLCP’s mission is to enhance the way we live by fundamentally changing the way we talk about death. Their community partners provide support, services, and education to help you talk about what’s important to you so that you can live well and end well. The work they are doing to normalize death as a topic for conversation, and educate everyone on how to plan for their own end of life journey has truly been transformational for us–both in terms of how we view the topic ourselves and how we see their work affecting the community. We are thankful that they have given us the opportunity to advise on data management, evaluation, and strategic planning for their incredible initiative, and we very much look forward to documenting their story and impact in the years to come!
Public libraries serve incredibly important roles in communities. They are a social structure for community members to come together, they serve as an educational hub, and they employ passionate educators and social servants. For more than a year we have been working with the Pima County Public Library System to conduct a comprehensive job analysis with the goal of producing community-relevant job descriptions and branch-specific staffing models. Ultimately, this will better enable system administrators to continue building and maintaining a healthy and supportive structure — better positioning themselves to deliver community-specific services across each of its branches. Having the opportunity to work with such a large group of professionals from across all levels of a library system has been a rewarding experience. Not only have we been able to learn the backgrounds and stories of so many of them, but we also have very much enjoyed working with a highly engaged administrative team and task force throughout the process.
The Financial Wellness Partnership, anchored at the United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona, brings together community organizations, nonprofits, funders, businesses, and government offices for focused discussions on financial well-being. The group seeks to improve the financial wellness of individuals and families by increasing accessibility to effective services, resources, and opportunities, and by influencing policy to develop equitable, people-centered systems that support financial wellness. Their intentionality in this work has led to opportunities for ongoing collaboration with our team, including facilitation, program design, logic model development, and process evaluation. If you haven’t already, we encourage you to sign up for their mailing list to stay in the loop on their latest activities! We want to express an especially heartfelt thank you to the Partnership and its members for their immediate community support throughout the pandemic. Simply put, these folks are “people first,” which resonates with our philosophy.
Gila County Department of Public Health is responsible for many important initiatives across their community. Among these initiatives are their efforts to better understand and address teen pregnancy through purposeful education and prevention. Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to work with their team to conduct a comprehensive literature review examining this public health concern. Our collaborative efforts helped identify national and regional techniques for proactively addressing teen pregnancy and are being used to adapt their county’s current programming (as well as to inform other teen pregnancy prevention initiatives across Arizona).
Peak Nutrition is a comprehensive health and nutrition company based in Phoenix, Arizona. Providing their clients with A-Z nutrition solutions is their primary focus — helping folks achieve measurable results. Therefore, it’s probably not a big surprise that they recognized the importance of adding real-time performance metrics to their decision making process. Our team worked with their Chief Operations Officer to stand up a Tableau solution — consolidating countless static reports into a centralized tool! Through our training, their team has been able to leverage Tableau to access their data in a convenient and meaningful way. This is a great example of how our team helped with the foundation through customized training but our client really took it and ran — we’re excited to see what they conquer next in Tableau!
What else is good?
In addition to working with some awesome folks, this year has consisted of two other significant milestones — a growing team and branding makeover.
A growing team
We’re constantly looking for great people to collaborate with us. Each brings a unique set of skills and perspective. Both are important as we show up to engage with our clients. Interested in learning more? Check out our team or send us a message.
Logo + Brand + Website Redesign
This year we partnered with Kicks Digital Marketing to better communicate what Viable Insights is all about as a program evaluation and organizational development firm. We are in-freaking-love with what they came up with and feel it truly represents how we approach all things data. If you haven’t taken a look, carve out a minute — we think the team at Kicks outdid themselves. 10/10 recommend.
That’s a wrap!
All of that to say, it’s clear we have a lot to be thankful for. Our community, the work we’re privileged to be able to do, and so much more. We hope you find time for relationships in this new year, too (even if it is distanced). On that note, we want to invite you to spend more time with us in 2021 — check out our events page to save yourself a seat!