Turning Data on Youth into Impact in Houston, TX

“What are the issues behind the issues?”

That’s the question Olivera Jankovska wrestles with most as Director of the Mayor’s Office of Education and Youth & Engagement (MOEYE) in the City of Houston. Fueled by strong support from the mayor, the Office is tasked with providing resources and programs for children, youth, and young adults. To make the greatest impact, Jankovska and her team must identify the underlying issues their communities face – and the MOEYE has succeeded in doing so, through innovative use of data.

An economist by training, Jankovska understands how to navigate financial realities. Cities have tight budgets and often rely on grants to fulfill their goals. She explains: “It’s not usually possible to create programs that address everyone’s needs throughout an entire city, especially in a city the size of Houston. But if a city can gain clarity about what’s happening, for whom, in which specific areas, they can more efficiently allocate their limited resources to those who would benefit most.”

In 2023, the City of Houston applied successfully for a spot in the National League of Cities’ (NLC) Capstone Challenge program. NLC created this program to help cities make the best use of data in achieving their goals. That's where the City Health Dashboard (CHDB), a partner in the Capstone Challenge, came in.

Jankovska brought a clear question to the Dashboard team to work on together for the Capstone Challenge: “Are there youth participating in our program, from specific neighborhoods, with low rates of bank accounts and low digital access?”

Houston collects various data on young people’s needs, including banking enrollment and financial literacy, via the City’s Summer Internship program survey. When their database was overlaid with Dashboard broadband access metrics, the landscape of needs became clearer – not just of the initial problem of the economic barriers youth face, but of the issues underlying those barriers. Jankovska explains: “Our data shows low banking access, but with the additional information of where internet access is hard to come by from the Dashboard’s data, an explanation emerges - it might be because people don’t have internet to log in and access a bank account.”

The team also used the Dashboard’s Redlining Map feature to identify zip codes and neighborhoods for more in-depth outreach. This use of Dashboard data informed MOEYE’s future outreach and resource allocation priorities – and contributed to the success in 2025 of a grant application to NLC, resulting in MOEYE being awarded an Advancing Economic Mobility Grant. With nuanced reports in hand that pointed at specific needs in specific neighborhoods, the City of Houston could clearly show grantors what was needed.

Lessons Learned

Jankovska has learned how important it is to identify the “why?” behind the issues communities face: “If we don’t look into the root causes of the problems, we can continue to reactively respond – but we won’t make a big difference.” She compares looking at data without considering the context to judging a book by its cover. “We could have done wrong in how we addressed financial literacy if we hadn’t looked deeper. Correlation and causation are two different things.”

The work is ongoing; Jankovska considers her team to be “climbing the mountain, but we haven’t yet surpassed the peaks.” In the truest sense of impact, she believes they have “just scratched the surface of the full extent of what this data can achieve.” She wants to collect more data – ultimately live, on-demand data, across multiple years – and to explore more ways to integrate databases. Sharing stories of how data impacts real people is also a priority: “We have to tell the community about the work we’ve done, marry the data and stories to bring it to life,” Jankovska explains.

Keys to Success

• “Supportive leadership made this possible.” Jankovska credits the mayor of Houston, who believed in and supported the MOEYE’s innovative methods for addressing community issues.

• "Strive to be not just data-driven, but data-informed.” If MOEYE had been data-driven, they could have provided financial literacy resources to the youth in the identified areas - but would not have realized the additional need to provide digital support. Data-informed meant they knew digital literacy was connected to financial access.

• “There is funding out there – but it begins with strong, reliable data.” A funder needs to see a clear, data-informed plan in a grant application. Once funded, momentum can build, as one grant can open the door for the next.

• “We cannot and should not do things on our own; intercity collaboration is critical.” MOEYE first heard about one grant they received from another city and believes in the power of cross-collaboration amongst cities.

The partnership between CHDB and Houston demonstrates a synergistic approach to attending to a city’s needs. Local-level, accessible data were essential not only in deepening the city’s understanding of a community they had hoped to reach, but also in securing funding for ongoing improvement efforts. With reliable data, thoughtful questions, and supportive collaboration, cities can design data-informed strategies and programs that effectively address the needs of the communities they serve.