Scorecard for
Shared Prosperity

In Greater Seattle, disparities are getting worse with deepening inequities and we see income, race, and other identity factors often determining who participates in our region’s decision making. Traditional government and philanthropic decision-making structures often fail to make progress on key issues in a timely or inclusive manner. It’s time to address fragmentation and truly activate collective leadership.

In order to measure shared economic prosperity, we embrace an approach focused on equity, which we define based on King County’s Social Justice Plan as “a system of fairness by which all individuals, particularly across gender, racial, and geographic lines, have access to opportunities and resources to achieve their full potential and thrive.”

The Scorecard for Shared Prosperity (Scorecard) was built to provide leaders in the private, philanthropic, government, and community sectors with a data-driven economic scorecard to facilitate the use of common metrics and set the stage for collaborative strategy setting that drives regional change. It is an easy-to-use tool that measures and tracks our collective progress around key indicators that measure economic prosperity and equitable distribution of opportunity. Our objective is to reframe what it means to achieve shared prosperity, and to equip regional leaders with a means to evaluate our region’s performance. The Scorecard is a living asset that will be updated and modified on a regular basis.

Our data sources include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, National Conference on Citizenship, King County Detention and Alternatives Report, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Air Quality Index Report, U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction Washington Data Portal, King County Metro, Feeding America Food Insecurity Map, American Community Survey, U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Small Business Jobs Index, Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, and Washington State Department of Transportation. We also include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Living Wage Calculator.

The Scorecard focuses on racial and economic equity because we believe that these are critical levers to pull in order to improve shared prosperity and participation for all. We have collaborated with our partners to understand and display other inequities such as gender, age or ability, however, many of our datasets are limited in size and difficult to disaggregate. In addition, we would like to present the intersectionality of inequities in a meaningful and intentional way which will require continued work with our partners and collaborators so that information can be displayed in the most meaningful way possible. We plan on examining best ways to incorporate other dimensions of inequity in the Scorecard in future iterations.

The Scorecard presents data separated into White (non-Hispanic White) and People of Color (POC). This comparison is not meant to hold non-Hispanic White outcomes as ideal, but rather showcases the disparities that currently exist. POC can represent different racial/ethnic groups, because of the variety of data sources used in the Scorecard. All data sources are listed below each graph on the Scorecard, and the link will provide information on which racial/ethnic groups were included in that particular POC category. There are many well-recognized and innate challenges with racial/ethnic groups as collected in all of these datasets, which is why some of the datasets have no breakdown by race. Having singular categories for people to self-report their race or ethnicity can mask, discount or make invisible large groups of people. While we understand these challenges and are continuing to improve representation in the Scorecard, we are limited to publicly available data and therefore limited to their methodology of racial/ethnic group categorization.

We are moving towards further disaggregation of the POC category and are examining our datasets to ensure that sample sizes are adequate to accurately pull out races and ethnicities from the POC category. In conversations with partners and our Advisory Committee, we understand the importance of disaggregation and the limitation of commonly presented racial groups such as Asian or Black, which are broad categories in themselves and mask many underlying disparities within those categories. As the Scorecard moves forward in future iterations, we will be intentionally looking at our datasets and analysis to address these limitations, but we face significant challenges in the datasets that are available and how they have chosen to collect data around race and ethnicity.

A technical guide to the data and methodology behind the analysis in the Scorecard is in development and will be posted as soon as it is completed. For any questions about data or methods, please contact the Civic Commons team at info@civic-commons.org.

The data in the Scorecard will be updated on an annual basis or as updates to the datasets become available. We may also add in new indicators or change the datasets, and any new indicators or datasets will be updated on a similar schedule.

Yes, all of our data sources are linked at the bottom of the corresponding graph. These links are verified and updated on a regular basis to ensure that all users have Learn more at civic-commons.org. access to the underlying data. If you have any issues accessing data sources, please contact us at info@ civic-commons.org.

The Scorecard is meant to be a tool for the Greater Seattle region, defined as King County. However, where county level data was not available, we used metropolitan areas of Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue based on the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s December 2003 Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA) definitions. The geography of the dataset is located in the What is this Metric? section of each graph.

Since our indicators come from a variety of data sources, we used the most recent years available within that specific data source. This results in varied time frames for each indicator, but as the Scorecard continues to evolve and grow overtime, we see these timeframes becoming more consistent.

For policy briefs/websites/blogs/popular press, we recommend the citation read Civic Commons, Scorecard for Shared Prosperity, www.civic-commons.org/ scorecard-for-shared-prosperity.

The Scorecard for Shared Prosperity is the product of a partnership between Civic Commons, Deloitte and Camber Collective. Our organizations began working in 2018 to create the Scorecard to act as a “north star” for regional leaders to assess how well we are collectively making progress towards agreed upon goals. In addition, community and cross-sector partners were convened on a regular basis to provide insight and feedback into the presentation and selection of indicators and will continue to be central to selection and adaptation of indicators and datasets in the future. Local partners play an important role in shaping our research agenda and ensuring that we produce data and analyses that inform action.