Lea Gorgulu Webb
Lea Gorgulu Webb, is a Data4Good veteran, a social justice lawyer and techy, turned data culture developer. She built a system for addressing the needs of abused immigrants in the US based on research in open data in the 1990s, built a social just law firm using SaaS tools to fund work across a large region of the US, and developed software and business processes for providing crucial income support and tax help to undocumented immigrants in the USA before moving to London. After consulting with charities across London regarding research, she joined Peabody Housing in 2018. There she has focused on building data literacy, showing people how to approach data for success, and recruiting other data talent to help the large housing provider turn communities of data into power for the people. She has decided that the low-code tools that are available from tech giants are great for democratizing data - not only for driving profit at private companies. The pandemic gave Lea a chance to show Peabody staff what the tools could do and how to change old ways of depending on slow IT teams into new ways of creating fast and cheap tools that earn their keep and are easy to dispose of and change when the time comes.
Tuesday 11 May
Using data at the Peabody Housing Association
Peabody’s Resident Wellbeing Project was set up in May 2020 in response to the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent national lockdown. Peabody identified their most vulnerable residents and developed a plan to provide an immediate response to their needs during lockdown. The project has a series of deliverables which support Peabody residents in need. It began with a few very important pieces of data about each resident, and led to providing services via a well-architected and quickly designed data flow; locally based groups providing assistance with food; employment; advice regarding sources of help including government programmes; and even an app to facilitate a befriending programme.