Charlottesville Region COVID Equity and Recovery Datahub

The Equity Atlas coalition is partnering with the UVA Global Policy Center to organize, visualize, and share data about COVID crisis response to inform equitable recovery. Toward this end, the response and recovery dashboard will provide easily accessible measures sought and shared by community organizations and members, will be iterative and responsive to feedback, and will be openly and publicly accessible with a secure, confidential section to display more sensitive data accessible to the community leaders of COVID crisis response.

The Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas project is a collaboration between the University of Virginia Library, the Equity Center, and the broader regional community to imagine and co-create a platform to combine, visualize, and make accessible data about local disparities. An Equity Atlas serves as a data and policy tool for leaders and advocates to advance a more equitable community while helping citizens hold decision-makers accountable.

The first prototype of the Atlas was built in collaboration with Siri Russell, director of Albemarle County’s Office of Equity and Inclusion, as a decision-support tool to help local government work with its residents to achieve more equitable outcomes. Working closely with a coalition of local community leaders, including local government leaders, but also representatives from the Food Justice Network, from Piedmont Housing Alliance, from the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, the Health Department, the UVA President’s Council on Community Partnerships, and others, the Equity Atlas team has been developing the socio-technical infrastructure for this portal to be built on a shared platform of data ethics that ensures a “first, do no harm” commitment to low income residents.

The COVID-19 crisis has hastened the need for a shared data infrastructure, so this team is pivoting to an applied data ethics strategy through the co-production of a COVID-19 recovery and response dashboard that supports the efforts of mutual aid and human services providers to collaborate on their current response, evaluates gaps in service provision, and interrogates unjust systems to ensure a community-driven, data-informed, and justice-oriented recovery effort.


The mission of the UVA Democracy Initiative Center for the Redress of Inequity through Community-Engaged Scholarship is to tangibly redress racial and economic inequity in university communities by advancing a transformative approach to the fundamental research mission, which will, in turn, reform institutional values, pedagogy, and operations. For more on our other action-oriented projects, click here.