Candice Mays Transcript: June 2, 2025

Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00):

Session two of the June, 2025 Widening the Pipeline virtual training. We’ll discover how harnessing the power of data can yield impactful storytelling. We’re joined by Candice Mays, who is the project director at Mapping Black California. It’s the only community newsroom in the country with a dedicated data journalism unit. Candice designs data journalism products that integrate writing data and visual mediums to address systemic inequalities that affect Black communities. And Candice is also a member of the 2026 John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship class at Stanford University. You can read her full bio on our website at nationalpress.org. Candice, thank you so much for joining us.

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (00:55):

Thank you for having me. I’m really happy to be here.

Rachel Jones/NPF (00:58):

So as I told you during our prep conversation, your LinkedIn description of yourself and your own biographical description of this moment in journalism was fascinating to me. So I know you’ve prepared a presentation for us, but give us a little insight into your background before we get started.

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (01:22):

Absolutely. Sure. Yeah, it is interesting. It’s fascinating for me to try to put it together to be honest. My background is in education and creative writing. I was a literacy teacher of the department, New York City Department of Education for three years as well as I got it afterwards leaving, I got an MFA in creative writing from the University of Miami where I also taught rhetoric and composition and creative writing at the collegiate level. So my background is primarily in education and storytelling, and I really think that’s the bridge that the skillset and the interest that I bring over into data journalism is from a storytelling front. I call myself a transdisciplinary storyteller because as I said, my background’s in creative writing through our media work. I’ve learned that I’m very good at also crafting stories out of visual mediums and not necessarily moving ones. And I’m referring to things like ad campaigns and things of that nature.

(02:18):

And then also with data. I’m very intrigued by maps and data visualizations as a storytelling tool and all of the ways that you can play with data and be creative about what is and is not data. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more today in order to tell authentic stories of history of community and of culture. And so a new title that I’ve added to transdisciplinary storyteller that I’m working on owning is also creative technologist. There are so many tools out there, as we all know, and these tools can be used to cause problems as we often hear about, but they can also be used to solve problems including the absence of stories from our communities went in the hands of people with authentic intentions. And so with my journey into journalism and in data journalism, always when I first started this job, I would say like, oh, I have an unorthodox path path into mapmaking.

(03:16):

But then so did all other map makers, many map makers are in mapmaking because they were working on something and they needed a map and it didn’t exist. So they had to learn how to make the map. And I would hear that repeatedly, and that’s part of how our data journalism unit started with the newsroom. So I kind of stopped having explaining it that way. But when I look at the common threads in addition to storytelling was also being Black and from California living elsewhere and not realizing how proud I was of where I was from until I lived elsewhere and talked about it probably to the point of being a little obnoxious. And so in coming back home and finding a place where that was exactly what we wanted to do was tell the authentic story of what it meant to be Black and from California, even as someone that does not consider myself a scientist, it was a perfect fit because of that.

Rachel Jones/NPF (04:09):

Well, now you all see why I thought it was such a good idea to have Candice join us. So I’m going to turn it over to you. Please take it away.

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (04:18):

OK. I’m going to share my screen all about the you. That’s so funny. Trey, I once had a flight attendant and then I will get on topic. Rachel, I had a flight attendant. I was like half sleep. And she said, ma’am, and I looked up and she was doing this and I was confused. And then she was like all about the U. I was an art student, so I was like, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK.

Rachel Jones/NPF (04:41):

Yeah, no, it’s a fm. We’re everywhere. So anytime.

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (04:44):

I, oh wait. Yeah. OK. That explains it. Yeah. Weird things happen when you go to a football. That was my first football school too. So school too. So weird things happen when you go to a football school that I didn’t realize. So as Rachel mentioned, I’m Candice Mayes, project director of Mapping Black California. She stole all of my intro lines about us being the only community newsroom in the country to our knowledge with a dedicated data journalism unit. Today, of course, I’m going to walk you through the founding of our organization and also the work we do, why we do it, how we do it, and ideally teach you or provide you a couple of tips for how you can get started on your own journey with data and data journalism. You do not have. There are ways for you, I feel like sometimes, especially coming from a writing background, data can be really intimidating.

(05:33):

Spreadsheets can be really intimidating and partnerships can take you a long way even if your newsroom does not offer the resources. There are lots of people because of the vehicle of storytelling and the access to getting a broader audience, there are many data people who are very interested in partnering. So I hope to talk about that as well. As Rachel mentioned, and I discussed, my background is in education and in creative writing. So when I moved back home to California, my goal was to work part-time to finish my book. And so when I got this job with Mapping Black California, our publisher, Dr. T. Brown Hines, who there’ll be a slide from her a little bit later, she’d said, oh, we have this project. It’s kind of an experiment. We need someone to focus on building it out into a real thing. Are you interested in doing that?

(06:22):

It’s about making maps and my work as a creative writer involved, trying to look at maps and see where Black migration did and didn’t go and what rail lines people took and things of that nature. And so I said, oh, maps, that’s really cool. Yeah, let’s do it. Not having really any experience in Mapmaking, in fact, she kept using the acronym GIS, and two weeks in I had to say, what is GIS? And she explained it was Geospatial Information Sciences. And I was like, oh, that makes sense. And so I really came into it from a kind of like a Pollyanna point of view. And then what I quickly realized is without data, you can’t make maps. The map is not the most, the map is the vehicle through which you communicate the data and what it means to a broader audience. But the data is the most important component.

(07:11):

If you don’t have it, then you don’t have a map. And upon our work, I quickly realized that data has a race problem because publicly available data often fails to reflect what’s happening in Black communities and other communities of color through the lack of detailed data, disaggregated data or information that is outright excluded from data reporting. An example I can use is I live Black Voice News is a newspaper in the Inland Empire of Southern California that’s Riverside in San Bernardino counties. Some of you may have heard of our Riverside sheriff, Chad Bianco. He’s grown quite a national profile. He’s been on TV on a number of conservative outlets. He’s now running for governor. Our executive editor is very opinionated about him in her weekly op-eds. And when she does have opinions, she receives very interesting emails from the general public. And so whenever we do any sort of investigations into, for example, police encounters that result in hospitalizations, not necessarily deaths, we struggle with reporting on things like that because all of the boxes are not checked in the report.

(08:27):

So we can’t tell what were the race of the people who were hospitalized, things of that nature. That really speaks to the information we need for our audiences as a Black newspaper. We also, in the state of California, marijuana has been legalized. So people with marijuana convictions are allowed to have their records expunged and the expungement rates in Riverside County are drastically lower than the rest of the state, whereas the rest of the state may be at like 50 60% of expungement. Riverside is like 10 to 20%. And it’s hard to really assess is there a trend here? What are the ethnic backgrounds of the people who are getting expunged versus not expunged when we’re not disaggregating the data to see what’s happening? To who specifically? So this was really an eyeopening moment for me when I realized that data had a race problem and that our mission was about so much more than just making maps.

(09:22):

A couple of examples of when data has a race problem. I’m going to walk you through a couple of case studies that was also me learning by fire through experience about how extensive this issue is. One is about how flawed data can lead to the misallocation of resources. And also just as a side note, Rachel, I can’t see my clock, so feel free to let me know if I’m talking for too long. I’m going to try to go up and check it as I’m speaking. So I got hired in 2019 and that was when we were ramping up for the 2020 census. And so our organization has an external arm as strategic media consultants as a way to underwrite the newspaper as part of our diversified revenue stream. And so we were hired by the California Complete Count Office as the African-American media statewide, strategically tasked with disseminating accurate information to Black communities across the state about why it’s important to participate in the census.

(10:21):

For a variety of reasons, Black people are considered hard to count. Part of it is being housing impacted multiple families that are not a part of the same family unit, living in the same home, having children ages zero to five, distrust of government for very credible resources. All of these things, and then some contribute to it being very difficult to count accurately count Black people in the state. The irony of this was while the state had a hard to count map that showed where in buckets hard to count people lived, that map was not disaggregated by race. And because the map was not disaggregated by race, had we used that map to identify where to disseminate information and focus our efforts, we would’ve misallocate resources because for example, San Jose is statistically a very culturally diverse area. So the state’s map identified it as an area of focus.

(11:20):

However, San Jose’s Black population is practically zero. So if we were to go by that map, we would be disseminating information out into the ether to nowhere because our audience does not live there anymore. And so what we had to do was we had to develop our own map, and that meant securing disaggregated data. That meant going out and looking for that data. It’s ourselves. Very fortunately, there was a retired Black sociologist from University of California Riverside, which is our institution who had the data and we heard in a very Black way through word of mouth about this academic who had this data. And then my map maker at the time had to go to this man’s house and sit in his living room to ask him for the data. And through that, we were able to develop a statewide hard account map that identified the highest concentration of Black people across the state.

(12:19):

And we had narrowed it down to nine places. San Diego, the Inland Empire where I live, Los Angeles, a few communities in the Central Valley, the San Francisco Bay area, really Oakland and then Sacramento. And so that way we were able to identify where people lived and what were some of the specific iniquities of where they were living regionally that made it difficult for them to participate in the census. Because California is a very big state. Lifestyles can differ drastically across the state depending on not just whether or not you’re close to a city or not, but whether you live in a desert or not, things of that nature. And so we really wanted to look at the context in which Black people are living. That’s very important and that’s where mapping can be helpful because then you’re taking the person, you’re taking the data point and you’re placing it in the context of all of the constructs that are imposed on them and how does that impact their life.

(13:14):

So through this, we develop a statewide media. We developed a statewide partnership with other Black legacy media newspapers in California in order to disseminate information about the census to audiences. We were aware as a local community newspaper in Riverside, in San Bernardino that we’re not going to have as much street cred in the Central Valley or in Sacramento or in Stockton. And so it was really important to us to identify trusted messengers in communities to disseminate this information. And this will be an ongoing theme throughout this presentation about how even if you have the information, it needs to be distributed to the community through the right outlets and those outlets can vary. So through that, we were able to disseminate over a hundred targeted assets. And from that, our Black population count was more accurate than the national count. And I want to put this in context of it was a first term for an administration that I’m not going to mention by name.

(14:17):

There were a lot of intentional systemic efforts to stop people from participating in the census. And this was compounded by the murder of George Floyd and the increase in Black Lives Matter protesting and COVID-19 because you could not go to door to door and ring people’s doorbell and say, have you participated in the census? Let’s do it right now. So this was a huge feat. While the nation’s undercount of Black populations increased from 2.1% in 2010 to 3.3% in 2020, our under count was only off by 1%. And that’s even though 30% live in hard to count areas identified via map. So this is an example of how using data to identify where people are, what their needs are, and then developing storytelling and other assets to communicate information to them through the right vehicles is in fact effective. Another example from the same time period, and I always use these two examples, even though now it’s going on five years because it teaches me lessons today and these issues still impact us today.

(15:21):

And so flawed datas and how it puts Black communities lives at risk. During the early reporting of COVID-19 in 2020, there were a lot of myths and rumors flying around through Disinclusion and the spread of misinformation about what was happening in Black communities. There was the thing of Black people couldn’t get COVID-19 and then because when they were looking at death rates for a while, our rates were lower, that we couldn’t die from COVID-19 because our communities, many Black people are O-positive, right? And so there was this idea that either we weren’t getting it, we weren’t being impacted or that we couldn’t die from it and spreading myths of dehumanizing us. This also as a side note, mirrors what happened with influenza in the early 20th century. We were also overwhelmingly impacted by influenza and not recorded as being so and so in reality, we knew that there was a difference right from our lived experiences of hearing what was happening in our communities, what was happening to family members, friends and so forth.

(16:21):

And when we did our work, we realized there was an increased likelihood of being impacted by COVID-19 because Black people will have an increased likelihood of being a low wage frontline worker, which increases your susceptibility to contracting the virus. Well, our work in the census taught us that we’re also more likely to live in dense, multi-generational housing where you can then bring the home, the virus to higher risk populations like the elderly. So not only are we more likely to contract it because we’re more likely to be on the front lines, we were also more likely to then turn around and spread it to the individuals. We want to keep the most safe in our homes. And so we had to really look at the data in order to see how it was impacting our communities. So what we did was we developed the dashboard that you see over to the right in which we looked at how COVID-19 was impacting Black workers in the state of California.

(17:13):

This was the first dashboard published disaggregated by race, looking specifically at Black communities. And so in 2022, however, once the fear around COVID-19 died down, the state stopped publishing worker data disaggregated by race. And so we had to depreciate our dashboard. Also in 2022, we had the privilege of having a private audience with Attorney General Banta, and we advocated for greater disaggregated racial data access. We were at the Inland Community Foundation. I was present that I’m showing you today, and I said kind of flippantly because it’s what happened. By the way, we had to depreciate this dashboard because the state stopped publishing the status disaggregated by race. And when I said that the attorney general’s eyes got really big, and it was the really big of you seeing someone who’s like, oh, I didn’t know this. And so afterwards, someone walked up to me and they said, Ooh, shots fired.

(18:15):

And I was like, I didn’t fire no shots. I was just saying what happened. I really didn’t realize that that could have been perceived that way. And so we didn’t hear back from him. We didn’t hear anything. And then two years later, there was a policy change with assembly bill number 1604, chapter three 13, making California the first state to mandate the breakdown of employee data by ethnicity. And when that happened, I forwarded, I saw it in a newsletter, I forwarded it to my publisher. I said, I think this was us. I think we did this, but we didn’t have any confirmation, so we didn’t fully brag about it. And then that summer, I was at a policy summit back at the community foundation and one of the attorney general’s people stopped me in the hallway and he said, by the way, that was you.

(19:02):

That’s how we got that done. And so now I’m telling everybody, so anytime you see me present, I’m going to be bringing that up. We need to brag about ourselves. And so this is also an example of another component of our work, which is also realizing you need the data to make the maps. If you don’t have the data, you need to advocate for the data. And so I consider that the most important part of my work. This is our publisher, Dr. Paulette Brown Hines, who founded Mapping Black California and really was curious about maps and wanted to explore it. She says, we frequently encounter data gaps that perpetuate harm in our communities. We need a solution that is structured within a community mapping framework, encouraging community collaboration. Oh no, go back. Community collaboration, my God, keep my hands off the mouse around data and information by bringing together community media, community-based organizations and philanthropic institutions.

(19:59):

That solution is Mapping Black California, and I’ll speak more to how we bring together those three sectors to make sure they really engage and interact using data as the foundation for that engagement so that we can ensure that we resources are going, is most impactful for our communities, and that the information is getting out there through those trusted channels via trusted messengers. Let me check my time. And so the solution is Mapping Black California, as Rachel mentioned, we designed data visualizations to develop narrative storytelling tools addressing systemic inequities at regional and local levels. This is really what sets us apart, is designing data visualizations for narrative storytelling. Because of my work in media and also in data, I’m at media conferences or I’m at geographic information science conferences, and it’s two very different audiences and attendees. And what I see at data conferences is that a lot of times data scientists are publishing things and speaking to each other in the work that they do.

(21:07):

They’re not speaking to the general public. They’re either talking to other data scientists, public health officials that are always buried in data, government institutions, things of that nature. And so the information they’re providing is good, but it is sometimes good, but we can talk about that later. However, it’s not digestible. So then you read it, you may not know how to tell the next person about it, which is the most important thing. And so we really want to couch it and narrative storytelling. And that’s where my background as an educator comes in because while my project manager is our lead data analyst, I can look at the map and think about how people learn and retain information and say, OK, this is confusing. Let’s switch this way. People think left to right in this dashboard. So this stat needs to come first as background knowledge, things of that nature.

(21:58):

And we’ll talk about how narrative storytelling humanizes the data as well and turns the numbers into people. Because a lot of times when numbers get so big, we can forget that every dot on the map is tens of thousands of people. I’ve been looking at a map where it’s looking at depths and I’ve heard someone say, cool, map. This map is not cool. This is the opposite of cool. This is terrifying. OK, I see comments in the chat. So we do this through a four pronged approach. The first is research, right? You need to gather your data. We’ll talk about this a little bit more today. We often pull it from government reports, journalist research and community-based organizations. And then we take that data, we clean it, and we restructure it to make it usable for what we’re looking at. Secondly, of course, you visualize it dashboards and map making.

(22:53):

We provide context to those numbers so you can say, OK, these people live here. This is what’s going on in this community. And then that provides direction for journalists and other storytellers to identify people and stakeholders in those impacted by these numbers to be able to talk to those numbers from personal experience. It’s one thing to read that there is, this is something I learned through data research. There is a low number of health care providers in my community, and it’s another thing to then experience it and understand, oh, even though I’m insured, I am going to urgent cares because it is so hard to find a primary care physician because there’s not that many of them. And it really changes the way I and our audience navigates the world, and that’s the ultimate goal. Secondly, you then have to amplify the visualizations. You have to make sure people are seeing them.

(23:42):

I know all of you as journalists understand this as well. You got to write the story and then make sure people read it. So we share this through a variety of channels, primarily, of course, through our newspaper, Black Voice News. We also partner with other newspapers to disseminate storytelling and visualizations. And we also developed a statewide database of Black dot orgs that’s over 600 plus organizations. And we leverage those partnerships to disseminate the information even further, whether it’s the maps themselves, data, storytelling, all of the above. You have to be really creative when you think about what your network is and how you’re gathering information and also how you’re distributing it. And as I mentioned before, advocacy is, in my opinion, the most important part of the job because people can’t fix a problem if they don’t know it’s there. And through my experience with the attorney General, it taught me something really, really nuanced or eyeopening, which was that sometimes it is about being loud and being like they’re going to do X, Y, and Z, and other times it’s simply about communicating a need. By the way, we don’t have this data, so we can’t make this dashboard anymore. And then once the person knows there’s a need, they’ll get it done if they’re an ally. And so that’s really important for us. Whenever I do this presentation, I always talk about the importance of having disaggregated data so that you can have accurate information in order to tell stories, in order to communicate to people, elected officials, stakeholders, what’s happening and how we can then create solutions.

(25:17):

And so one of the most important things to do is align data with community narratives. It’s really important to make sure that you’re building trust with your community because the information only goes as far as the community is willing to talk about it. You want to make sure that it goes into the funnel and is a part of the conversations in conversations you don’t know about like conversations in people’s living rooms. That’s where the real movement happens. And so one of the things that we think about with that cultural trust is what stories are important to us as a Black newspaper to me as a Black person to our communities and our values culturally are different from other cultural values, and that’s OK because we all have different cultures and we have different priorities. With the data sciences, with it being a predominantly white male industry, it is designed around their values and what they deem most important.

(26:14):

And because of that, the data we’re often looking at is numbers based, right? We’re looking at bars, we’re looking at charts and things like that, and little pockets of information. However, in my culture, oral histories are valued, right? Personal stories are valued. And what you often don’t hear is that that is data. Primary resources are data, oral histories are data artifacts from your community, from your home are data. All of these things count. And so one of the things that we really strive to do is identify ways to integrate those alternative forms of data into our mapmaking and our storytelling in order to create community histories that are reflective of our community, told an authentic way that is engaging, relatable, all of the above. And so that shapes the perspective on data, that shapes our perspective on data and what can and can’t be used. It doesn’t just have to be numbers. It can be a whole variety of things. And I’ll show you some examples later.

(27:19):

You have to also take into account that those with past injustices may be skeptical of certain sources. When we were looking at COVID-19 and vaccination and how do we get people vaccinated, our communities have historically been very skeptical of getting vaccinated for very historically credible reasons. And so all of those things have to be taken into account. When I was a literacy teacher, teaching students learning to read can often be traumatic. It can often be a very unpleasant experience if you are not a natural reader. And so as a high school teacher teaching literacy to ninth graders who already have opinions set about reading, I had to acknowledge how they felt about reading, and I had to let them talk about how they felt about reading in order to get them to start to shift their mind towards reading. And the same has to happen with our work and as community members telling stories about our people.

(28:11):

We’re in a unique position to do so because we’re not coming at it from an authoritarian standpoint, which I think is something that often happens in journalism and can be off-putting to a lot of communities that are used to being marginalized and overlooked. You need to align data sources with respected, trusted organizations and consider if they are identity inclusive or generated by members belonging to those communities that you’re telling stories about. So this is where that partnership comes into play of who are you bringing into this conversation? Who are you bringing in to participate in this work and participate in this effort? And this is where a reciprocal relationship begins to form, right? If I might seeing that, oh, there’s this trend of a lot of people in this community developing respiratory illnesses due to proximity to warehouses. Who’s working with this community? What public health organization’s working with this specific community and how can I work with them and get them to want to engage with us so that it’s mutually beneficial?

(29:09):

How can we develop relationships that are not just extractive is really important. Also, transparency and explaining why data sources were chosen and addressing community concerns when they come up is a part of that whole thing of making sure you’re keeping community centered throughout. And I think a lot of times in data scientists, the opposite happens because they’re so focused on the numbers and the visualization that they forget that there’s people behind those numbers. And that’s what’s most important. And then being open to community feedback to ensure data is meaningful and acceptable. An example of this is when we began to develop our blackwood orgs database and there was no statewide list and we had multiple clients asking for a statewide list. And so we finally were able to get funding to begin developing one. But because there was not a statewide list, we had to really do some unsexy work of some deep Googling to try and find Black lit organizations that may not have had a high profile across the state.

(30:08):

We had to pick up the phone and call people who didn’t have websites or who were missing certain information on their websites in order to make as robust a dataset about Black lit orgs in the state as possible. And as a result, because of human error, we’re missing some things. And so on that database we say at the bottom, Hey, are we missing your organization or do you know of some other organizations that are missing that should be included? Submit here we are acknowledging this data set as a work in progress. We’ll continuously need updating and we need your input in order to make that happen. And this is also a way to not just gain the public’s trust in data, but to gain their own investment and buy-in into data and why it’s important.

(30:52):

So here’s a case study about what I was speaking of before about how oral histories are data too. I mentioned that I’m from Riverside County, specifically I am from Reno Valley, California, which is the Blackest city in the Inland Empire. Since then, it’s shifted a little bit. I believe we are now the Blackest dense in Victorville has the highest Black population, but our map is called the Blackest city. So we going to keep going with that. So Moreno Valley, when my family moved out here, was a predominantly white community. And as more people, particularly Black families, begin to move east out of Los Angeles into Moreno Valley for a variety of reasons, we saw white flight. And with that, the storytelling and the narrative around our community changed drastically. And so when I returned, I was hearing nothing but bad things about my community. However, when I, in my day-to-day life was looking around, I didn’t see the stories that I was hearing. Not to say my city’s perfect, but when I would see a Black dad and his son bike riding to the middle school every day I would see a group of Black kids playing basketball at the park. I was not seeing this dangerous place where it was unsafe for people to be outside.

(32:07):

I wanted to explore that also, in being from Riverside County and being so close to Los Angeles, our stories are often Los Angeles overshadows what’s happening in our communities. And even now that the population is growing, we’re still having a little bit of that battle. And so I grew up believing that I was from a place without history. And through this job, I’ve learned the complete opposite. I’ve learned that there have been Black communities in the Inland Empire for over a hundred years, and that they’ve even founded some of the wealthier white communities with their work. And so it was really important to me to look into what was Marina Valley’s story from the perspective of Black people. We recently opened in downtown Riverside, the Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California. And as a part of their inaugural exhibit, they were looking at Black migration into the Inland Empire.

(32:59):

I was partnered on an exhibit about maps with two academics, and they had their set areas of study and what they wanted to make maps on. And it left a gap. One academic looked a lot at the 1910s and twenties to the 1940s, and then the other one looked a lot at the forties to the seventies. And then there was the gap from the seventies to present. And coincidentally or fatefully, the seventies to present was the establishment of my hometown more Reno Valley. And so they’re like, well, what are we going to do? And I seized my window. I said, you can’t talk about Black migration to the Inland Empire and not talk about the Blackest city. So from that, this map was born and I really wanted to take an alternative approach. This was a chance to have Black people tell their story about their community instead of allowing outsiders to tell their story.

(33:48):

So I did an email blast. I sent out a call for people to tell their stories, and I partnered with an academic at UCR, Dr. Anthony Jerry, who’s an anthropologist because I’ve never done oral histories before, so I wanted to make sure I was doing it accurately. So I partnered with a local expert who was more than happy to join on this because it counts as a publication for him. And so we did. We collected eight oral histories from Black people of a variety of backgrounds. So some were older, some were younger. We had young families, we had single people, we had married people, we had people who moved to Moreno Valley in the seventies and know when it got started, we had people who came in the middle when the Black population was really booming, and we had people who left because they could no longer afford it.

(34:31):

And through those oral histories, we really let them tell their stories of why they came, how they got established, what were the obstacles and what were their hopes for the community. And from that, we got a completely different perspective of Moreno Valley. And while it’s not a perfect place, it is a place where people want to come and raise their families and do see opportunity. And they’ve also faced struggles. And so for example, here we have March Air Force Base. That was the impetus for the establishment of the Black community in this area because a lot of people came for the Air Force. Then we talked about ways that people enjoyed themselves and the unique resources of this community, one of which being that there’s a lake here. And so this is actually my cousin and her husband. And growing up on the 4th of July, our families would plan these huge giant parties on the lake.

(35:24):

And as a kid, I didn’t think about it. It was just what we did. But now, as an adult looking back, we were the Black family on the lake really claiming public space and living a life of leisure in this city that now has this terrible reputation. And then we also got real and looked at a lot of the challenges and a lot of the racism that people faced. I didn’t know this was happening until I started doing this research, but in 2008, there were a series of police raid on Black barbershops in which they always found nothing. I’ve heard stories about the clan, I haven’t experienced ’em, but I often heard them. And then through our work, we heard about a little boy who fell asleep on the bus and woke up in the bus parking lot because the driver did not wake him up at his stop.

(36:08):

We heard about the first Black prom queen at a local high school who, or homecoming queen, who even though every year the homecoming queen got a full page layout, she was excluded from the yearbook and her mother had to go demand that they add an insert page into the yearbook. And so what was normally a story about like, oh, it’s ghetto. There a bunch of Black and brown people live there, really shifted to what we know of just families trying to have better lives and encountering obstacles around the way along the way that are often systemic. And one more thing I want to add about this is the way we use these histories is data is every time people, when they tell stories, they talk about plays. And so every time someone mentioned a place, we use that as a plot point on the map.

(36:55):

So when Hazel Lambert talked about moving out because of the Air force base, that’s where we plotted her story. When my cousin talked about the lake, that’s where we plotted her story. And so that way the data, the oral histories become the data guiding you through what’s happening in a community. I think I have about six minutes, so I’m going to go a little faster. So with data collection and validation, there are steps, right? The two parts are determining authority and understanding provenance. So when you’re determining authorities, who are the leaders reporting around this topic, there are certain organizations you can’t leave out or it looks like your research wasn’t diligent. And if there is an organization you leave out, have a reason why. How long have they been publishing this data in the field of interest? Who financially supports their research and publications we know, especially from now who’s financing?

(37:45):

It says a lot about what biases may be in that data or what intentions may be behind why that data is out there. And along those lines, if what narrative are they looking to push? Is this data bias? Is it slanted? It is possible to design data to lean towards what you want to talk about and not towards the actual truth. And even in our work with, sometimes my editor will say, we want to write a story about X. And then we go into the research and we say, well, actually why X isn’t happening? It’s Y. And then the story has to change. Understanding provenance, of course, as you all know, is very important When you’re gathering data or when you’re working with a data collector. Larger, more diverse respondent pools are the most representative verifying data across different sources, checking peer reviews, all of those matching data with community experiences, because discrepancies might mean more data is needed.

(38:41):

So for example, with COVID-19, community experience was very different from the early reporting that was coming out about what was happening in Black communities and be open to surprises and ready to explore further. That’s the example of my editor saying that X isn’t actually the source of what’s happening. Y is here’s a resources cheat sheet for the sake of time. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. And Rachel, I hope you send this out afterwards. Of course, as you know, some data sources are better than others. And so there’s areas of overlap as well. We often start with social determinants of health when looking at what’s happening in communities. So education, health, environmental population, economic labor is another area. All of these things overlap, right? And create context collapses in people’s lives. And typically population is going to tell you where they are, how old they are, all of those things who lives there.

(39:39):

And then I often say health is the next determining factor because then you’re looking at what are all the reasons for these health outcomes. If you want to know how good a community’s doing, look at health outcomes and it’ll tell you a lot. And that can really be ground one for finding other things. And then there’s often other sources. Community foundations have organization lists. Don’t underestimate your local organizations as resources, whether it be not just for storytelling, but for data, for any sorts of thing, even for dissemination of stories. Your community-based organizations are going to be one of your strongest vehicles.

(40:15):

A case study of connecting audiences with data is the listening to Black Californians campaign. The Community Healthcare Foundation did a statewide survey of Black Californians about their experiences in the public healthcare system. They surveyed over 3,000 Black Californians as part of that example of a broad diverse data pool, asking them about how they navigate the system. And the findings were very interesting as primary to public opinion, Black people care about their health, they’re actually very open to alternative forms of medicine and healing, and they are also increasingly understanding of the importance of mental health care and focusing on that in order to regulate and ensure the rest of their body is healthy. And so from that information, the foundation was really, really prioritizing ensuring that something came out of that research that we’re not just extracting your stories of trauma and your experiences with doctors, but that we’re developing something that can be used for you.

(41:13):

And that’s where we came in and we took the data and we examined it to identify trends of what were the needs of people who are navigating the healthcare system. Because of the Affordable Healthcare Act in California, Black people are overwhelmingly insured, like 90%, but the healthcare system is complicated, and I can attest to that. So we developed the How do I campaign that provided a variety of resources to help them navigate that system, right? So how do I find a doctor that’s right for me? How do I know what questions to ask when I go into the doctor? How do I be prepared? Things of that nature. We developed a variety of assets that we wanted to disseminate to them. Now Mapping Black California has a background in data. We are not known as the go-to people for public health, for Black communities. And so we wanted to partner with a trusted messenger that has a reputation and an accurate and trusted reputation for communicating what’s good for Black communities to Black people across the state.

(42:14):

And so we partnered with the California Black Healthcare Network, which is a statewide network of hundreds of Black public health organizations working in communities on the ground at the grassroots level. And we stood up this How do I campaign page where community members and community-based organizations could access this information and repurpose it for the people that they serve. And so this is an example of connecting audiences with data is through storytelling that was developed from this, but it’s also through additional resources that we provide to community-based organizations to help them work with their populations. Here’s the list of tools and platforms for creating visualizations. The data visualization catalog, oh, sorry, the data visualizations catalog is a good start. This will show you what kinds of charts exist, what kind of maps exist data needs, how audiences understand them. I always say the data dictates the form.

(43:16):

So it may not always be a map or it may be a different kind of chart versus another, and it’s really important to develop an understanding of what something is best for. Through our work with COVID-19, I learned dashboards are a terrible way to communicate information to the general public. It really is. And so we don’t really make too many of them anymore for the general public, for clients, private clients, we’ll develop those, but not for our audiences with the newspaper because it is a difficult tool to show them how to navigate through the data because you’re just looking at a cluster of data in one spot. There’s Flourish, there’s Canva, arc, GS Online, which is a software developed by Esri is one of our primary partners and one we use a lot. They make plug and play tools to make mapmaking very easy. If you are someone who’s good at teaching yourself things, then ArcGIS is perfect for you. They also have a expansive repository of data sets available, so when you’re looking for things, you might want to start there and they will have it available to you. And here’s a list of other ones. The other thing I want to say, oh, did I just blank on what I wanted to say about repositories of data sets? I did. Maybe it’ll come back to me. That’s so frustrating.

(44:38):

I just blanked on it. I’ll come back hopefully during q and a, I’ll remember what I wanted to say. And then here are some other resources as well for creating data visualizations. And it’s really about assessing your needs, your learning level, and then what do you need for what you’re making. We don’t always use rrc GS online. Sometimes we use Flourish for Things. Sometimes we use Tableau. It really just varies. So that’s my presentation for today. Please check us out. Our website is mappingblackca.com. You can also via, these are direct links, but these are all available on our website. You can access our California Black Blood Orgs database, our combating racism as a public health crisis platform, which is combating racism.com. You can see it in the gif. To the left. We gathered all of the declarations of racism as a public health crisis in the state of California made at the city level or the county level.

(45:30):

We mapped them, we developed a scorecard assessing the thoroughness of those declarations, and then we also authenticated the declarations and any information pertaining to those declarations on blockchain. So that way if a county or a city is like, ah, that’s not that important anymore, we don’t have to do it. Yes you do, because we authenticated it and you made the promise. Or something as simple as Link Rock, where if a developer updates a webpage or a website and that page crashes and no one notices, how can you access it? So we’ve made it permanent on blockchain. And then also, of course, our parent publication Black Voice News. Thank you so much.

Rachel Jones/NPF (46:08):

Absolutely. Terrific presentation. Thank you so much. While I wait to see if there are any Zoom hands that go up, I wanted to ask you a quick question, and that is again, given this current climate of anti DEI and people sort of being hesitant to lead with those kinds of issues, what is the take at your publication about the legs this issue will have or whether you’re meeting some resistance to these kinds of stories?

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (46:46):

That’s a good question. So far we’ve been fortunate that we haven’t encountered too many issues. One of the things that I really lean on though, we have an organization that does tours of a specific nature, and the focus of those tours is on the Underground Railroad. However, it’s about they lead with it being about professional development with teachers. For me, in thinking about the importance of disaggregated data, I think about it from a standpoint of accurate information. And so that’s where I’m leaning now. I’m using it to talk about Black people, but we need this aggregated data period. I’ve heard about in our local community about some smaller foundations who have pivoted away from funding organizations, and there are other ones who are doubling down, and those ones who are doubling down are also talking about ways to combine resources band together and also interact with those other funders about why that’s happening and what the solutions could be.

(47:52):

So I don’t honestly have any hard and fast responses to that at the moment, but we also, diversity of the work that we do plays into that. And by diversity of the work, I mean we have an internal and external arm. So internally we work with our newsroom developing stories, and we fund those primarily through grants. And then externally, because we have a specialty, we also have a consulting arm. And those consulting contracts are not always focused specifically on Black people. And so our clients come from a diverse span of backgrounds and interest levels. For example, most recently we wrapped a contract with Orange County working on a statewide initiative called California Jobs First and Orange County doesn’t have a lot of Black people. However, we’re still able to provide that lens of looking at where do people live and what’s happening in those communities where those people live, not just ethnically but spatially. And as far as resource economic standpoint,

Rachel Jones/NPF (48:54):

We do have a couple of hands now. So let’s go first to Gabriel and then Erie, introduce yourself to Candice.

Gabriel Cortes/CNBC (49:01):

Hi Candice, thank you so much for this fantastic presentation. I’m also from the Inland Empire, so we should get one. I’m the data journalist at CNBC. And my question for you is how do you stay current? Because some of the stuff that I made earlier in my career when I was first learning Arc, GIS and stuff like that, they’ve broken. They sure do. And now I don’t have a ton of professional development. Part of that is because I’m fully remote, but how do you stay current on new products? What’s breaking in terms of old stuff that we’ve used that’s breaking? What are the new products? I mean, do you have any advice for keeping up to date with all of the new stuff that we can give to our readers?

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (49:52):

That’s something that’s a problem that we’re actively figuring out. Because we’re a small team, it’s primarily two of us. And then, depending on the workload, we’ll pivot to various freelancers. And so for example, when I was putting together this presentation, my project manager helped me with the slides, and then I was going over them this morning and I was swapping some things out. And when I was talking about the census, I wanted to put in the map and the map was broke, and I was like, it’s like, let’s do, I can’t get it fixed now. So we also encounter those things, right? And sometimes we don’t know it’s broke until you click on it because to your point about updates and things of that nature, so that’s an ongoing thing. And in our brain, it’s like we’ll have a system where we’ll check things regularly and capacity makes that difficult to your point.

(50:32):

So we’re struggling in that area too, but when I see it broken, I email and say, fix it on the note. So that’s one part. On the note of staying current with New Tech, I would recommend I talked about Esri a little bit. There’s other resources, but as I said, esri’s kind of the most plug and play thing for mapping to my knowledge. They have a big conference every year in San Diego called the User Conference, and that is map making central. It’s international. There’s people who come from all over with a variety of experiences. So you can go there and take a workshop to learn how to make a map all the way up to hard level coding with Python. And their conference is really where they launch a lot of their new products and talk about new things. So Map, I go there, my job as a project director is landing contracts and shaping the product into a story.

(51:23):

And then my Mapmaker leaves with all these new things that we can use do and use. The other thing that I do is I attend other conferences that aren’t specifically directed towards mapmaking. One of a good avenue that’s been for me is media conferences that talk about tech and ai because through that, because since I’ve entered this kind in a backdoor kind of way, I’m often learning as I’m sitting here in any job you’re doing that, but I’m really learning as I’m going. And so through those confident conferences, like I said, I learned data. Without the data, you can’t make the map. The point I made about data being what people want access to and the map being the delivery tool was a revelation that I just recently had in the sense of we can make maps and other things with data. So now I want to do a deep dive into what are all the other things we can do with data and how can we get that to people As a part of that staying current, I think we have to constant, the tech is constantly evolving, so we have to be constantly evolving with it.

(52:30):

And this may not be to your question, but I’m going to say it anyways. With ai, it’s very intriguing because they’re developing it in real time as they’re releasing it to the public. And normally with tech, that does not happen normally. They perfected it, figured out how they’re going to monetize it, and then they send it out. But ai, they’re doing the opposite. So it’s the perfect time for people to get involved and learn as they’re learning because it’s a new literacy skill

(52:57):

That everyone’s going to need to be literate in order to stay current and stay competitive. And I think about that with all the tech forms. So if data, as I’m becoming more and more data literate and it is my job to make sure our readers are also data literate through what we’re teaching them with this work, because as you’re publishing these stories, you were teaching them how to read the map. You were teaching them how to read that chart within that story. And so always identifying you, constantly learning and being curious and identifying what’s next or what else can be told is part of that thing. Which also means being constantly uncomfortable. I’m very uncomfortable all the time. Every time I get asked to speak, I’m so uncomfortable because I’m still learning so much.

Rachel Jones/NPF (53:43):

I love that definition of this being the new literacy and being comfortable with being uncomfortable. I like that Kirti has her hand up.

Keerti Gopal/Inside Climate News (53:55):

Hi, I am Keerti Gopal, I’m with Inside Climate News. This is such a great presentation. Thanks for coming. I report on environmental health issues. So definitely a lot of the things you mentioned about lack of locally specific data is something that we run into a lot. And we’re working on a MAP project right now. That part of the project has to do with trying to map some specific health issues at a pretty granular local level. And there’s some of this data available through our Department of Public Health. This is in Chicago, but some of the data, there’s certain data sets that are by Citywide and then some that are by census tract or more localized. And I’m curious if you have any advice for other sources where we could get some of that more specific. For example, looking at rates of asthma, hospitalization by specific neighborhood. Some of that data isn’t super, are necessarily reliable or localized. And then other things like lead poisoning or lead exposure, things like that. Do you have any luck going through hospitals or health centers or things like that? What would you suggest?

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (55:12):

That varies? We have gone through hospitals, and I don’t know about how Chicago’s laid out, but in the Inland Empire there’s networks. So there’s Kaiser Permanente, we have the L Loma Linda University medical system, and then there’s IEHP, and they publish their own data sets. I think what you’re speaking to is something that we’ve also encountered where how they report and the granularity level and things of that is not uniformed.

(55:39):

And so what I want to do is I’m going to put my email in the chat, email me and I’ll introduce you to my data analyst. She can talk through that troubleshooting with you better than I can while I have a couple of thoughts that are coming to mind being that you want to report it. My first thing is, OK, well then do city and we’re statewide. So oftentimes that works. But because you’re talking about Chicago, that’s not going to be as effective. So I think about can you do zip code level? I don’t know how many zip codes are in Chicago, things of that nature. So I’ll put my email in the chat right now and then email me and I’ll link you to her so that you two can put your heads together.

Keerti Gopal/Inside Climate News (56:14):

Awesome. Thank you.

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (56:14):

You’re welcome.

Rachel Jones/NPF (56:16):

Well, seeing that there are no other hands up, I’ll do a last call and say again, what I appreciate about your presentation is the accessibility and the fact that the ability to pursue this type of journalism is possible. But more importantly, let’s end on a note about storytelling. Restate your connection between data and telling stories. For us,

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (56:48):

Stories are how you communicate what the data is talking about stories are how people learn, they’re how they digest information, they’re how they remember information. So putting a stat out there is one thing. Putting a series of stats out there is another thing. But when you tie it to a person, I may not remember that 18% of Black people have X, Y, and Z, but I remember the story about that person and that that person is reflective of a lot of other people in my community. And so the storytelling is the vehicle is ultimately how it arrives in a person’s brain and it lives there. I once sat in on a presentation where we were going after the next person and in putting together the PowerPoint, even I want a story in the PowerPoint and I’m always pushing that on my data analyst of like, how are we arcing this?

(57:37):

How are we organizing this information? How are we thematically connecting it? Because the general audience is going to follow the themes. They may not follow the actual specific plot points or data points. And before that, we had an academic present and she just did slide after slide of data, after data after data. And I was bored. So if I’m bored, somebody else is going to be bored. And my data analyst Novin said, good thing. Ours has a narrative. And so I really think about that. The data is talking about people’s lives and the storytelling is where people’s lives are able to, their stories are able to be told and their lives are able to be acknowledged and validated. It can become very easy to hide behind data and not have to interact with the people that are calculating up this data, whose stories are creating this data.

(58:28):

And I think storytelling breaks that barrier between that. The other thing I wanted to talk about, and maybe this is where I blinked, I know it’s one 30, is that might’ve been where I blinked talking about data sets, is if your background’s not in data sciences, I’m a literacy teacher, right? I have access to an analyst. There are academics at universities doing a lot of this research who are always looking for ways to publicize this research, to develop storytelling around this research. They may even design a class around what you want to research. We have had this happen, OK? And they’re tripping over themselves to work with you to design these classes and to put their students on this work. So really looking into all of your resources and be creative about all the information that could be out there is also recommended in that

Rachel Jones/NPF (59:15):

Candice Mays of Mapping Black California. Thank you for an incredibly powerful discussion and we wish you well moving forward into your night Stanford Fellowship as well. And we hope you’ll come back and talk to widening the pipeline again.

Candice Mays/Mapping Black California (59:31):

Thank you so much. I hope you’ll have me back.

Rachel Jones/NPF (59:34):

Take care.

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