Analytics for social innovation

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Ayana Littlejohn is committed to social innovation projects and outreach that inspires young Brown and Black girls to pursue education and careers in technology.Ayana Littlejohn provides impactful, data-driven insights by building predictive models for Fortune 500 brands, focusing on new product forecasting and customer intelligence for SAS. In addition to her core responsibilities, Ayana also serves as a Black Initiatives Group Leadership member and provides analytical expertise to the SAS Social Innovation team investigating inequalities in policies affecting marginalized and vulnerable populations. She spoke at a recent event on ways to find meaning with purpose-driven analytics, which you can now watch on demand.

Here’s an excerpt from the panel discussion:

“SAS hosted a social innovation project last year in which employees could create teams and explore and use analytics for topics like vulnerability, social justice, health care and environmental issues. I wanted to be a part of every single project, but ultimately, I decided to focus on [health and] vulnerable populations because of all these headlines I was seeing. I really wanted to see, is there an explanation? Is this a problem with Black people and our genetics, or is this a problem with how we don’t have the same access to what others have access to? Which then, in turn, leads to a problem with our overall health?

“We used public data from New York from all of the five boroughs. We profiled the five boroughs to see which boroughs had larger minority populations.…Now we see who is in each of the boroughs. From there, we said, ‘Let’s look at some health metrics.’

“How do we measure accessibility to health and other metrics that would be indicative of how often and what type of healthy food people in those boroughs are consuming? We were able to get our hands on some really rich data sets that included things like the average consumption of fruit and vegetables, the number of bodegas in a neighborhood….We also had access to the number of fresh markets and local markets – stores like Publix, Harris Teeter and Whole Foods.

“We decided to use these as a ratio. What’s the ratio of these bodegas that traditionally carry a lot of unhealthy food (that we have seen through studies are linked to hypertension and high cholesterol)? And what we found was that, in the neighborhoods with higher proportions of minority constituents, there was a much larger bodega-to-fresh-food-market [ratio]. And there was a much smaller rate for fruit and vegetable consumption.

“Then we said, ‘Is this correlated to health factors that we’ve seen in these areas?’ We looked at things like kidney failure, hypertension, high cholesterol, mortality rates – a litany of health issues.

“Instead of comparing what we found to each of these individual health variables – because we had about three weeks to do this – we combined all these health risks into an overall health index.”

Preview her comments here, and hear more about social innovation and analytics in this on-demand webcast.