May 21, 2020 •Colby Ziegler
Want a peek into our team's current data analysis work? Summit recently developed a new tool to help our mission-based clients visualize the areas heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. By graphically displaying the data, Summit’s mission-based clients can easily digest the severity and unexpected risks presented to their operations by COVID-19.
About the tool. This tool, built primarily in R using three packages, leaflet, tidyverse, and tigris, tracks and displays the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths by county, overlaid with the locations of Certified Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs). Our tool also contains layers for Initial and Continue Unemployment Claims, as well as a layer that displays the trends associated with confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Here are two visualizations we created with the tool. The first shows Initial Unemployment Claims overlaid with Certified CDFIs for the contiguous United States, while the second shows the percentage change in the seven day moving average of confirmed cases.
About the data. In developing the tool, the Summit Team use data available from the Department of the Treasury, CDFI Fund, The New York Times, and FRED. The data sources are used to populate the CDFI markers, COVID-19 county overlay, and unemployment data, respectively.
About the lenders. CDFIs are mission-based lenders that serve the most vulnerable communities in our society, providing funding to typically under-served and low-income individuals and families. As such, CDFIs have tremendous impact in guiding investment into areas where it is needed most, when it is needed most.
Summit is proud to empower our mission-based clients to effectively and efficiently respond to the ongoing health pandemic. These groups provide vital loans, investments, or technical assistance to the communities in need during this period and beyond.