State Water Board subcommittee launches racial-equity data training with DataMaid demonstration

The State Water Board's Racial Equity Data Subcommittee held its first webinar to introduce practical methods for analyzing racial equity in water programs, featuring a presentation by Hannah, a partner at DataMaid, who demonstrated census retrieval, spatial-join workflows and exploratory analyses.

The session matters because staff across the Water Board will increasingly rely on program and public-data analysis to assess whether policies and operations produce disparate outcomes by race and ethnicity. Molly Williams, an environmental scientist in the Office of Public Participation, said the subcommittee's goal is to "build and operationalize data resources from across the Water Board and across the state so that we can better understand and promote equity in all of our programs and policies." She invited staff interested in equity-data work to join and said slides and a recording would be shared after the webinar.

Hannah, the presenter, framed racial equity using a definition from racialequitytools.org as the condition "that would be achieved if one's racial…