When ÈÕº«ÎÞÂë ÈÕº«ÎÞÂë launched the Office of Engagement (OoE) in 2020, providing data to Vermont businesses and non-profits in support of economic and community development was identified as a vital service. Data services was seen as a key support to two of the office’s pillars: economic and workforce development.
Data allows organizations to establish benchmarks and shape goals that are realistic and based on real conditions. For example, the right data can help identify gaps between the skills of job applicants and the skills required for available positions, for example. It can also provide hard numbers to support (or refute) anecdotal evidence.
Emma Spett G 20', OoE research assistant and PhD student in the Sustainable Development Policy, Economics, and Governance program, has fulfilled the data services imperative in OoE since the office launched. In fact, she was the second person to join OoE following the appointment of her academic mentor Christopher Koliba, who served as director from 2020-2023.
The data services provided by the Office of Engagement offer on-demand reports on economic and workforce development data at the state, county, and zip-code levels. To date, Spett has fielded over 100 separate requests for data from Vermont organizations while supplying annual county-level data reports on economic and workforce development to all 11 regional development corporations in the state.
We talked with Emma about her involvement in OoE and the data services she provides.
Emma how did you get involve with the OoE?
I was living in Vermont, working at Shelburne Farms, and I wanted to go to graduate school for environmental management. Chris was working on this transboundary flood project for the Lake Champlain Basin and invited me to be a graduate student. So I did that for a couple years, earned my masters, and started looking for jobs during the summer of 2020. Chris called me one day and he said ‘there's this new thing called the Office of Engagement. Do you want to join as a PhD student?’
What was one of the first big projects you were involved in?
One of the first big endeavors was the statewide roundtables, which ended up being published as a statewide report. We wanted to know what everyone was terrified and excited about in economic development—this was in early 2021, and we were feeling like were just coming out of COVID. We put together nine focus groups—all virtual—with people from all over the state. We had representation from all 14 counties and different sectors including economic development, the BIPOC community, the business community, social services, and government and nonprofit organizations. With every region and every sector, the issue of data access and availability came up. We felt as though we needed to figure out how to do that because it was a natural gap that a university could be filling, especially a land grant university.
Tell us more about the data service you provide?
Our work is inspired by community-engaged economic development programs run out of other universities, like Bowling Green State University’s Center for Regional Development. That program was being run by a former student of Chris Koliba’s, and he offered great insight into some of the platforms he used to guide the services they provide to stakeholders, which include JobsEQ and Lightcast.
We decided that as a new office that was working on workforce and economic development, we could fill similar gaps in our community. So we began to offer ad hoc and regular data services to anyone who was interested. I provide county level data reports on economic and workforce development—this year will be the second year we're doing this—to all 11 regional development corporations in the state. This includes a lot of baseline data on industry and occupations, and wages and education in their regions. We'll do that again in April. It also builds relationships with folks at the RDCs, so that they know they can call on us for additional data requests.
You receive other data requests, too.
Yes, I’ve fielded over 100 requests since the office started.
How do you guide people to the right information?
What I ask people is, let's let the questions you have to drive the discussion, not the data itself. What are the questions you want to answer and how can I offer data that will either validate or defy your assumption? How can we use data to back up your claims? That encourages a level of thoughtfulness. Instead of just plugging in the numbers, let's use what we know about our communities to think about how we might use this data.
It sounds like your role is as much educational as it is data-driven.
I see myself as more of a data navigator. My favorite thing that happens when we share data is that it prompts conversation. We're able to shed light on whether the data I was providing was accurate or if it wasn't telling the full story of their communities. And then we can talk about why that might be.
What do you think next steps might be?
One thing we’ve had discussions about is how do we start to use the information we’ve gathered from two years of fielding data requests from across Vermont, and leveraging research capacity at ÈÕº«ÎÞÂë, to deliver more targeted data services that address uniquely Vermont, and uniquely rural issues. I think that would be like a really cool evolution of what I'm doing.
Have a data service request? Please use this form to request a data services product from the ÈÕº«ÎÞÂë Office of Engagement.