This illustration is done in the spirit and style of a young child, joyfully depicting their family.

Original artwork by Surface Impression (Aedán Crooke) for the Information Privacy Commissioner of Ontario

City of Toronto

Raising the Village open data project aims to improve the lives of children and their families

Raising the Village is an initiative by the Toronto Child & Family Network that involves collecting and publishing aggregate data to help understand socio-economic challenges for Toronto’s children and families and improve their well-being.

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The Toronto Child & Family Network is a community collaborative focussed on improving quality and integration of services provided to families and children in Toronto. With their Raising the Village initiative, they collect and make publicly available data on 15 child, family, and Indigenous well-being outcomes that guide planning and decision-making among network members. This important data is shared online in aggregate form on the Raising the Village website. The website features dynamic visualizations for over 100 child and family well-being indicators covering a wide range of outcome areas including physical health and development, learning and education, strong families, and financial security.

Raising the Village is a website that brings together data to understand child and family wellbeing in Toronto. Raising the Village is a project of the Toronto Child and Family Network, a group that works together to improve child and family wellbeing in the city. It makes population data interactive and interesting. You can zoom in on your neighborhood and find information to answer your question about how children and families are doing.

There are 10 child and family outcomes that provide focus and spark action towards positive change. There are also five outcomes that were co-developed with Toronto Indigenous children and families. All of the outcomes are measured and tracked by over 100 indicators. These indicators can be broken down by neighborhood, gender, race, and more to understand differences in outcomes.

So why do we need all this data about Toronto children and families? Data starts conversations about our city, neighborhoods, and kids like us. This helps us to understand, work together and plan for action to address issues. My dad told me that data guides policy and big decisions made my governments, organizations, and communities. Data helps you ask questions and learn new and surprising things about child and family needs. When all of you understand the inequities faced by children and families, you can work together better to address the gaps. On a neighborhood level, this helps us better know the communities where we live.

Now that you know all about Raising the Village, how will you work together to make a difference for Toronto’s children and families? Learn more by looking at the different tools, outcomes, and indicators on raisingthevillage.ca. Bye.

The website provides tools for data analysis for various purposes, such as viewing neighbourhood-level data for localized planning and demographic data to understand where there are more likely to be socio-economic challenges and inequitable experiences among different sub-populations of children and parents. The data are downloadable in various formats to make them easy to access and use. Instructional videos and guides are also available to help users with less experience working with data learn how to navigate the site and apply the data to their work. Updates to existing data are incorporated when they are available.

The network develops relationships with various organizations to increase the range and volume of data offered through the Raising the Village site. The data helps inform the efforts of the network and other organizations. For example, Toronto Children’s Services uses the data for strategic planning purposes, including in its administration of EarlyON, which offers free programming to support families with young children. Organizations benefit from the Raising the Village site for program planning, to address service gaps, to target new investments, as well as to bring about system-level changes to advance the well-being of children and families. It is a great example of collecting and making data available for good.

For more information