Selected Partnership Work

Brittany has a sustained interest in transforming the ways researchers, practitioners, and communities use data to gain new insights into the social context of schools and neighborhoods. She is a recipient of a Russell Sage Foundation grant to pair PTO tax data with schools nationwide and investigate their relationship to district-level achievement gaps available in the Stanford Education Data Archive. She currently provides technical assistance to a grassroots movement of parents in Durham, North Carolina working to close achievement and opportunity gaps in the public school district.

Data Walks

Prior to entering graduate school, Brittany worked at the Urban Institute where her experiences engaging in community-based participatory research and survey administration culminated in a strategy to engage stakeholders in a data validation process known as “Data Walks.” The strategy provides a way to make community-level data accessible and interactive while allowing opportunities for a cross-section of stakeholders to collaborate. These walks were designed to support researchers’ ability to interpret survey results while also encouraging collective action among residents, service providers, and policymakers to identify and pose solutions to their most pervasive place-based challenges.

DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative

The DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) is a place-based program funded by the Department of Education (DOE) to create a pipeline of services to shuttle chronically disadvantaged youth from the cradle to and through college. As the technical assistance partner, Brittany supported the effort to provide real-time feedback to inform programming strategies. This work included designing, administering, and analyzing school climate survey and neighborhood surveys. They also conducted a process study that included interviews, focus groups, and observations of DCPNI stakeholders during their daily operations. Brittany played an integral role in organizing site visits, developing protocols, collecting and analyzing data, and preparing memoranda for clients. These findings contributed to reports shared with the DOE, principals, residents, and the larger research and funder community.