Turning Resident Voices Into Regional Impact: How the Detroit Voices Data Dashboard Is Helping Inform Better Decisions

• Data tells us what is happening; resident voices help explain why. 
• The Detroit Voices Data Dashboard puts community insights directly into the hands of those who need them. 
• Better data can lead to better decisions and stronger outcomes for communities across the Detroit Region. 

When leaders make decisions about housing, education, healthcare, economic mobility, or community investment, they often rely on traditional metrics and publicly available datasets. But numbers alone do not always tell the full story.

That’s the idea behind the Detroit Voices Data Dashboard, a new interactive tool developed through a partnership between the Detroit Regional Chamber and Gallup that allows users to explore how residents experience life across Detroit neighborhoods, the city overall, and the broader Detroit Region.

During a July 27 community briefing, the leaders behind the Dashboard, a supporting funder, and a community partner discussed how the data can help inform strategy, guide investment, and drive community impact.

From Survey Data to Community Resource

The Dashboard builds upon the 2023 Detroit Resident Voices Survey, a research effort developed between the Chamber and Gallup’s Center on Black Voices.

According to the Chamber’s Sandy K. Baruah, the initiative represents the next step in a years-long effort to better understand how residents experience quality-of-life issues across the Region.

“What we realized,” Baruah said, “was the next best step [was] to create a community-accessible, free-of-charge data center that allows anybody — if you’re a corporate entity, if you are a government agency, if you’re a community group, if you’re a foundation — to be able to create your own reports based on Gallup’s world-class data.”

The result is a publicly available platform that combines insights gathered directly from more than 11,000 residents with Gallup research and complementary community datasets, creating a centralized resource for organizations seeking to better understand local conditions.

Making Resident Voices Accessible

Camille Lloyd of Gallup’s Center on Black Voices echoed accessibility as a central goal of the project.

Too often, she said, organizations collect community feedback, analyze it internally, and never return the information to the people who participated.

“If we’re democratizing the process of including resident voices within the decision-making process, part of that is also making this accessible,” Lloyd said. “We take for granted how inaccessible data is to the general public in a way that is actionable, insightful.”

The Dashboard seeks to change that dynamic by giving anyone interested in the data direct access.

“It’s a full-circle moment,” she said. “Residents have access to it, but also decision-makers.”

The Case for Investing in Data

Katie Weiler of the Gilbert Family Foundation emphasized that reliable, community-centered data is becoming increasingly important as organizations navigate shifting community needs and economic environments.

“We invest in housing stability; we invest in public spaces, in economic mobility,” Weiler said. “At the base of all of those, we believe that data is the driving factor.”

She noted that many organizations have relied on public datasets that are becoming less robust or less accessible.

“When we see an opportunity to invest in a dataset that is not just going to be published in a PDF… that is going to lift up the voices of the community, that’s such an exciting thing for us,” she said.

From Data to Impact

Life Remodeled’s Diallo Smith talked about how resident voice data can help organizations better understand whether their efforts are translating into meaningful outcomes for the communities they serve.

“We’ve all heard the phrase that ‘data is king,’” Smith said. “What I appreciate about what this platform has done for us … [is that] it is giving us an opportunity to be able to understand the sentiments, the behavior, the perception of thriving of our residents on the ground level.”

Smith reflected on a moment following the release of the original Detroit Resident Voices Survey, when Detroit’s Durfee neighborhood ranked second among the city’s highest-rated neighborhoods for thriving.

When community leaders learned the results, Smith said, they saw validation that their efforts were making a difference.

“They had a chance to see and understand that their voices mattered,” Smith said. “[And] that their community, from their perspective, was shifting and changing in a positive direction.”

Smith’s example highlights how the Dashboard combines resident voices with broader community data, giving organizations deeper context for decision-making.

“No data exists within a vacuum,” Lloyd said. “We look at our data as the complementary resident experience data that adds some context to what we know on those hard outcome data.”