In founding the Institute for Social Capital (ISC), the Foundation of UNC Charlotte created a vehicle for collaboration with local non-profits, governmental agencies, and community-based organizations to develop a means for compiling, validating and analyzing community data.  ISC is in the early stages of building and housing a comprehensive database of local social and human capital data. By connecting dispersed data sets, the database will provide a foundation for building an understanding of the social and environmental variables that affect the community, particularly outcomes for children and families.  The ISC database will serve as a basis for analysis and research in the community and at the university.  Through its partnership with UNC Charlotte, ISC also will provide the community with valuable analytical support, including technical support to help organizations define research efforts and required data, assist organizations in conducting data analyses, and support organizations in interpreting the results of an analysis. 

   The Institute for Social Capital will build this database by gathering and combining data from different sources.   At present, the city, county, schools, and a variety of nonprofits each have internal data but cannot combine the data to learn how a child or family in one program is affected by another.  The lack of combined data also means that the cumulative effects of programs, or the extent to which people participate in several different programs, cannot be determined easily.  By merging these different sources of data, ISC will improve understanding of how programs perform, with whom programs work, and in what combinations programs work.  Comparisons among programs or with a control group using groups matched on socio-economic or other variables will enable agencies to assess the impact of specific interventions. Likewise, the data can be used to provide evaluation of social capital initiatives. 

   ISC also hopes to help the community understand and appreciate how information sharing and accountability benefit the community and service organizations.  To this end, ISC is hosting a colloquium series to build community awareness and to inform the database development process by identifying types of research and evaluation the database will help address.  Click here for more information about upcoming colloquia.