Central Missouri Community Action hosted a Data Walk on Thursday, allowing people from across Callaway County an opportunity to provide input to what issues need addressed in the community.
The Data Walk was held in place of the April CRN meeting. The event was held at the Callaway Electric Cooperative. This was the fourth of eight Data Walks across the eight counties CMCA serves.
It serves Audrain, Boone, Callaway, Cole, Cooper, Howard, Moniteau and Osage counties.
The mission of CMCA is to “build relationships to empower people, strengthen resilience and improve quality of life for all members of the community,” according to the group’s website.
Darin Pries, CMCA executive director, said Thursday’s event was the largest turnout at any of the Data Walks so far.
This was the first Data Walk hosted in the county.
The purpose of the Data Walk is to help CMCA determine that the data it utilizes reflects the “priorities of the communities we serve,” Pries said.
The information CMCA receives from the Data Walks is critical, he said. The data will test the assumptions people have about what is going on.
“We don’t want to just plan our programs based on a wing and a prayer and gut instinct, we want to use the data to guide that. Really having these types of conversations is going to be critical,” Pries said.
Participants of the Data Walk went around the room and looked at various types of data showing statistics about Callaway County in a variety of categories.
The categories included housing, employment, income, education, health and nutrition, and social.
Melody Vieth, director of research and data, said the goal was to look at the data and determine the top priorities that the community would like addressed.
The data for the employment category compared Callaway’s labor force participation rate to the overall rate for Missouri. As of 2021, the county had a 59 percent labor force participation rate while the state had a rate of 64 percent.
One set of data at the Data Walk was focused on education. The data showed that the high school graduation rate for the county was 89 percent. Of the students who graduated in 2022, 34 percent went to a four year college, 20 percent went to a two year college, two percent went to a post-secondary technical institution, 28 percent went directly to employment and four percent entered the military.
After participants were given time to look at the data and write down their thoughts, they discussed with others and then shared their findings with the whole group through a facilitated discussion.
Each person was given a discussion guide with three questions for each category. The questions were how are we doing, are different groups of people doing equally well and what data stands out to you the most?
The Data Walk wrapped up with the participants voting on what the top priorities for the community should be.
Housing and employment were voted as the most significant community needs, Veith said.
Vieth said that the next step after the Data Walk is to develop an action plan to “align existing efforts and implement additional strategies to address these issues.”