Currently, CWK, Inc. has three active initiatives:
CWK Data Dashboard
The CWK Data Dashboard is a bedrock initiative of CWK, Inc. The Data Dashboard is built around the idea of “information portals.” Currently the Data Dashboard has nine portals:
- Community Profile
- Education
- Historic Timeline
- Historic Data
- Public Safety
- Resource Library
- Community Assets
- Partner Portals
Generally, the Data Dashboard serves as a one-stop shop for key data that is useable by community stakeholders, researchers, local government agencies, and relevant foundations who want a ready reference for information on Atlanta communities, but particularly Westside Atlanta communities.
The Data Dashboard is designed, therefore, with two imperatives in mind:
To be a user-friendly tool for this process in offering quantitative and qualitative data from publicly available sources.
Next Generation/
Atlanta Youth Leadership Initiative
This initiative emerges from a three-part collaboration with Communities Who Know, Inc. (CWK), These Halls Can Talk, Inc. (THCT), and the BLTN Next Generation Youth Leadership Network (BLTN NextGen), organized by the Bread Loaf Teacher Network of Middlebury College Bread Loaf School of English. Since 2017, BLTN NextGen has brought together diverse teams of young leaders from sites across the nation, including: Vermont, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia, the Navajo Nation, and the pueblos of New Mexico, with the expectation that additional sites will continue to join. Each site directs attention to the needs and interests of underserved populations—with educational and experiential opportunities for youth of color and youth from both urban and rural areas. Focusing on their local contexts, these teams participate in civic action, identifying problems and solutions that the particular site has determined to demand active response.
The Atlanta site is Next Generation/Atlanta (NextGen/ATL). It has been composed of two groups, with participants from:
- Booker T. Washington High School (who have been working on a website-based oral history project: https://thesehallscantalk.com/), and
- Benjamin E. Mays High School (who have been working on a video documentary project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5CEJ_KvbyM&feature=youtu.be).
Priorities have been to help students to build their historical knowledge, develop a critical framework for their perspectives about their communities, and ground those frameworks within the cultural frameworks of their own local communities even as they expand those frameworks in global scope.
The idea also is to leverage their capacities as problem-posers/solvers and communicators by enhancing their expertise in the use of digital technologies as the youth identify community-facing actions that they deem meaningful.
The expectation is that the participation of youth in these types of activities will help them to build knowledge, expertise, and experience as near future leaders who are preparing themselves to engage actively at whatever levels of their societies that they may choose.