Black African and Caribbean Population Profile for Wider Determinants of Health in Lewisham
Urban Dandelion CIC is a London-based community interest company that inspires communities to bring about the change they want to see. Community development and equity is at the heart of Urban Dandelion's work enabling Black residents and community organisations to create and deliver solutions that work for them and working with statutory organisations to design and deliver services that are sustainable and enable the people they serve to flourish.
The request
The aim of the work was to provide an initial evidence base of ethnic inequalities for Black African and Caribbean people in Lewisham to guide the direction of the organisation’s initiatives to address inequalities.
The research project proposal entailed the collection of reliable and wide-ranging demographic information across a number of different domains such as health outcomes, education, employment, income, and crime with a particular focus on disparities with respect to ethnicity.
This project required a statistician to collect data from a range of publicly available datasets and to produce summary reports, including the use of graphs, diagrams and infographics where appropriate.
The approach
Abigail Coxon and Aidan Metcalfe from the Office for National Statistics were matched to this project. They worked with Urban Dandelion to define the scope of the project and specify exact research questions. They searched for publicly available data sets and analysed the data in a statistical software package to create graphs for data visualisation. Using their knowledge, they highlighted the key messages and limitations of the data.
The result
A report was finalised and sent to Urban Dandelions. The report summarised the results of analysis that examines the relationship between ethnicity and four life outcomes in the London borough of Lewisham: Education, Employment, Income, and Health. Where available, the analysis included gender and age, and other locations and were analysed for comparison purposes with Lewisham.
Impact and benefits
Barbara Gray, CEO at Urban Dandelion wrote:
‘Evidence has shown that Black African and Caribbean communities experienced the worst outcome with Public Health England publishing a report with recommendations to achieve wide ranging change to address the social and economic factors which cause health inequalities.
The data sets were very timely in providing data in the very areas that needed to be explored and as the data emerged the information was used in conversations considering how Lewisham should respond to the unequal impact. Being able to quote specific data relating to Education, Employment, Income and most common causes of death (other than COVID19) enabled Urban Dandelion to engage with policy makers and service leads in each of those areas with very detailed data which provided a basis on which they could look at current issues at implementation level and explore a wider range of options that may not have done before where the concern lay, who was in urgent need of different approaches and interventions enabling a targeted approach rather than a generic response to BAME communities which is more common approach being used and its importance to really change longer-term practice which in themselves create inequality in outcome for particular groups.
At the time it seemed like a big ask but it did allow Urban Dandelion to be a bit ahead of the curve in their conversations locally and more widely and I would like to think has played an important role in Lewisham’s decision for all Anchor organisations to be evidence based and the recruitment of additional statisticians and data analysts for use across the borough.
It is unusual for a small local Black led organisation to work in this way using data as the foundation for all its work and conversations and I must say it has definitely given power to this and other marginalised Black communities Urban Dandelion has subsequently which is very powerful and a significant skill for building community knowledge and resilience, addressing the power imbalance demonstrating the role of data in enabling asset-based community development.
Thank you very much for supporting this project, the work of which continues with a higher profile at the most strategic levels in Lewisham.’