Message from the Board Chair - The Honorable Louis A. Trosch, Jr.
Let the trumpets sound and the banners fly. After untold hours of planning and hard work, the Institute for Social Capital (ISC), with help from its many partners, has designed and launched a fully integrated library of longitudinal social and human capital data. This database specifically focuses on the lives of Mecklenburg County’s children. It is a unique and powerful tool that will serve as a national model. Across the country, most efforts to capture data surrounding children remain fragmented and limited in scope. Conversely, the ISC database gathers information from multiple child serving agencies and merges it into one all-inclusive database.
The four initial agencies included in the database are the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools, the Department of Social Services, the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Department, and Communities in Schools. Eventually, the ISC plans to expand the database to integrate records from multiple child serving agencies in and around Charlotte-Mecklenburg. By combining records from many child serving agencies, the ISC’s database will enable researchers to comprehensively examine the social and environmental variables that impact children and their families.
Such an examination will allow governmental leaders, child serving agencies, and the public at large to accurately assess everything from gaps in services to the impact various programs have upon children. In short, we will learn what works and what does not work for our youth.