Jeri Mulrow, ASA President
Someone counted cars in a church parking lot every Sunday for months. Someone else walked up to the new president of a regional opera company and, with no invitation and no PowerPoint, asked if data might help save it. And someone else noticed, bag by bag, that a food bank kept running short on jelly. None of these people were asked to do this. They just noticed a problem and happened to be statisticians and data scientists.
That instinct to show up, pay attention, and offer something useful is exactly what Communities in Action was built to encourage and support. This initiative is no longer just an idea about what statisticians could do in their communities; it is what we are doing and the opportunities to do more. It is exciting!
In this update, I will share three of these stories and introduce a set of toolkits now in development that will make it even easier for you to find your own way in.
The Parking Lot That Became a Baseline
A church congregation outside Minneapolis was growing fast enough that parking had become a genuine crisis. The kind of problem that shows up as friction on Sunday mornings and anxiety at every board meeting about the building’s future. A longtime member, a statistician with decades of industry experience, didn’t wait for a formal ask. He started counting cars. Not glamorously. Not with any special tools. He picked a cutoff time, stood in the lot, and counted the onsite spaces, the overflow lot, and the street. Week after week, at first entirely on his own. Eventually, he brought the church’s parking volunteers into the process, teaching them what to track and why consistency mattered more than precision. He tracked down membership and giving data from other congregations in the Twin Cities. Suddenly, the board wasn’t just looking at their own numbers and seeing whatever story they wanted to believe. Today, the church is working with an architect on capital improvements and the parking question is one they can answer.
His advice to anyone considering this kind of work is refreshingly low stakes: Look at the places you’re already part of. You don’t need a proposal. Sometimes you just need a willingness to count cars.
Behind the Curtain at the Opera
Another statistician found his way into community work through a shared love of opera. When new leadership arrived at a major regional opera company, he introduced himself not as a data expert, but as a longtime patron who cared about the art form’s future and happened to have something useful to offer.
That relationship has grown into a pro bono partnership tackling existential questions for arts organizations everywhere: How do we convert first-time attendees into subscribers? How do we know whether audiences want to be challenged or comforted? How do we tell if a lower-priced ticket initiative is working.
His team’s analysis of the company’s “pick your price” experiment, which let new attendees pay as little as $11, even led to a methodological detour into using large language models to analyze open-ended survey responses, a project that pulled in a high school intern and produced a four-author paper spanning a statistician, a student, an opera singer, and the company’s president.
His advice: Find something you’d care about even if there was no data involved. Don’t lead with your tools, as he puts it. Don’t talk about your hammer until you know the problem is a nail. Listen first. The statistics come later.
Jelly, Canned Meat, and a Food Bank That Runs Smoother
Not every story requires 15 hours a week or a research paper. One ASA member has spent the past year and a half volunteering at a local food bank, which helps feed nearly 200 families through twice-monthly distributions. After a few months of watching the operation, a pattern emerged: certain items (e.g., jelly and certain canned meats) kept running short, forcing last-minute purchases. A simple analysis was all it took to see it coming. Now the food bank monitors those items and stocks up in advance, so distribution Saturdays run smoother for the volunteers and, more importantly, for the families counting on a full bag of groceries.
Communities in Action isn’t only about big, sustained engagements. It’s about the fact that a little attention, applied consistently, changes outcomes for real people.
Building the On-Ramps: Four Toolkits, Four Ways to Show Up
Not everyone has a lot of time to volunteer, a personal connection to a nonprofit’s leadership, or the standing to walk into a boardroom. Those are the gaps a set of small volunteer working groups are now closing. Each group is building a toolkit designed to lower the barrier to entry for a different kind of contribution.
The first toolkit is for the statistician with limited time who still wants to make an impact. It’s a hands-on set of materials for introducing young audiences to data and statistics. Built for a classroom, a library, or anywhere curiosity can be sparked in an afternoon.
The second is for anyone who’s found themselves talking to friends, neighbors, or a community group about data. It’s a growing repository of examples and resources for quantitative literacy—how to spot a bad graph in the news, and just as important, how to recognize a good one.
The third is for the statistician or data scientist who is ready to build a relationship with a community organization, a nonprofit, or a school. Maybe you already have a connection. Maybe you don’t. This toolkit helps you start that conversation.
The fourth is for the person who notices an organization is struggling with its own data management the way our food bank volunteer did. This one is built entirely around tools people already have, such as Excel and Google Sheets. No new software to learn. Just better practices and easier ways to use what they’ve already got.
Four toolkits. Four entry points. All of them designed around the same premise: You don’t need a title, a grant, or a formal invitation to make a difference. You just need to notice, and you need to show up.
What’s Next
The toolkits are just the beginning of the infrastructure we’re building. In the months ahead, we’ll keep developing and releasing new toolkits. We’re also building a list of organizational contacts to make getting involved easier from both directions—bottom-up, by inviting members to share the community organizations and connections they already have, and top-down, by identifying national-level contacts who can help make local introductions where members don’t yet have one. Once the toolkits are in hand, we plan to offer workshops on how to use them, so having the resource is never the barrier. And underneath it all, we’re working to grow a network of members who want to support this initiative and help sustain it for the long run. Our goal is to make it easier for the next person to show up.
Your Story Belongs Here
Every story in this initiative started the same way: Someone paid attention to a problem that was important to their community and used what they knew to help. If that sounds like something you’ve already done quietly, without fanfare—maybe without even thinking of it as “data work”—we want to hear about it.
Visit the Communities in Action website to share your story, learn more about the toolkits as they’re released, or simply let us know you’re interested. The next story could be yours.
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