TITLE
Recommendation to request City Manager to work with the Health and Human Services Department to develop guidelines for the collection and reporting of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) data by city departments that provide health care and other social services to better understand and improve the health and well-being of LGBTQ+ Long Beach residents.
DISCUSSION
Background:
The City of Long Beach is committed to using data to identify the needs of Long Beach residents and to evaluate whether the City is effectively and equitably meeting those needs. In recent years, Long Beach has been a trailblazer among California cities in its efforts to collect demographic data on racial inequities in our healthcare, grant-making, and contracting systems. The Racial Equity and Reconciliation Initial Report called on the City to, “increase the quality, use, transparency and public availability of data to inform institutional decisions and actions that improve outcomes in Black communities and communities of color.”1 Long Beach took this challenge in stride, using data-informed methods to prioritize an equitable distribution of CARES Act and American Rescue Plan Act funds through the Long Beach Recovery Act (LBRA), with an emphasis on supporting communities of color that were hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. These grant disbursements were tracked and made available to the public via the Long Beach Recovery Act Updates Dashboard, which provides disaggregated data on LBRA beneficiaries by race and ZIP code.
City staff has since built on the success of the LBRA dashboard, publishing a new Homelessness Emergency Dashboard earlier this year. The dashboard has drastically increased the city’s transparency around its homeless services provision and better informed public discourse on solutions to Long Beach’s housing crisis. The dashboard provides data on homeless services disaggregated by race, age, and length of homelessness, all of which help inform poli...
Click here for full text