A Mission-Based Data Group Becomes First U.S. Organization To Win The International Rafto Prize For Its Human Rights Work

San Francisco CA

09 October, 2021

3:41 PM

Description

By Eleni Balakrishnan, Mission Local October 7, 2021 When an organization seeks out Patrick Ball's nonprofit to do a statistical analysis, say, of the war crimes committed under a particular dictatorship, the first thing he tries to emphasize is that there are always gaps in the data. This humbling knowledge is the starting point for Ball's nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group, a tiny operation of statisticians he founded in 2002 that works out of a modest office on Bartlett Street in the Mission District. "Because of wildly varying levels of social visibility, there are silences in the data," says Ball, a statistician who serves as the group's director of research. "And if we're talking about trying to tell the truth about violence to people in the world, our first commitment should be to make sure that we document the violence against the most marginalized people." To read the full article, click here. Mission Local covers San Francisco from the vantage point of the Mission, a neighborhood with all of the promise and problems of a major city. You can support Mission Local here.