Helping communities build resilience through data
Headwaters Economics is a nonprofit research organization helping communities across the United States make informed community and land management decisions, respond to economic and environmental challenges, and support long-term economic sustainability. The organization works directly with communities, develops publicly accessible tools that bring data and insights to decision-makers nationwide, and contributes research and expertise to broader policy conversations.
“We don’t just want to provide communities with data and tools,” explains Tara Preston, Data Engineer at Headwaters Economics. “We want it to be understandable. We want the everyday decision maker to feel empowered to really help their communities. We provide the tools and capabilities to help them help themselves.”
Climate data can be difficult to collect, combine, and understand, especially for communities with limited resources. Headwaters Economics’ publicly available tools make this information more accessible, helping local leaders understand the risks their communities face and identify where support is needed most.
Preliminary research cited by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond suggests that less than 5% of philanthropic funding reaches rural communities. Headwaters Economics helps address this philanthropic gap by giving communities data to support funding applications and helping funders identify places that may otherwise be overlooked.
Simplifying complex data workflows
Climate, geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic datasets are at the heart of many of Headwaters Economics’ tools. Bringing that information together requires collecting data from a variety of sources, combining it with spatial data, and preparing it for analysis and visualization. It’s why Scott Story and Tara Preston, Data Engineers at the Montana-based organization, refer to themselves as “Data Wranglers.”
Before adopting FME, the team relied on custom Python scripts and multiple third-party applications, resulting in a fragmented process that was time-consuming to rerun whenever data was updated.
“[Before FME,] It took longer to achieve the same results,” says Scott Story. “FME has really increased our cadence. It allows us to quickly get data and bring it to bear as a product that people can use.”
Providing the tools to understand and address wildfire risk
Wildfire Risk to Communities is a U.S. Forest Service tool developed in partnership with Headwaters Economics and Pyrologix. It helps communities identify their wildfire risk and understand how to address that risk. Data is available for every U.S. community, allowing leaders to explore risks locally and across regions.
Populating the tool requires analyzing multiple raster datasets alongside thousands of community boundaries to generate statistics for each geographic area. Previously, updating this data involved multiple disconnected tools. With FME Form workspaces, the update process is now centralized and repeatable, allowing the team to refresh the tool when new data becomes available.
Headwaters Economics works closely with the USDA Forest Service to help communities use wildfire risk information in connection with the Community Wildfire Defense Grant (CWDG) program. This work helps communities connect information about local risks with funding opportunities for wildfire planning and mitigation.
Since its launch, the program has supported more than 250 grants totaling over $420 million, directing critical funding to low-capacity communities to carry out this work. Over five years, Wildfire Risk to Communities has been viewed over two million times, reflecting the reach of this now publicly-available information.
Identifying climate vulnerability at the neighbourhood level
Headwaters Economics’ Neighborhoods at Risk tool helps local leaders identify neighbourhoods within their communities that may be especially vulnerable to climate-related hazards.
The tool brings together information on hazards such as wildfire, flooding, and extreme heat with socioeconomic vulnerability data, including income levels, healthcare access, and housing characteristics at very detailed locations within a community.
These neighbourhood-level insights help local leaders understand where climate risks and social vulnerabilities overlap, so they can direct limited funding and resources toward the people and places that need support most.
Addressing the philanthropic gap with the Rural Capacity Index
The Rural Capacity Index helps identify communities where investments in staffing and expertise are needed to support infrastructure and climate resilience projects. It gives funders and other organizations a way to identify places that may need additional assistance to pursue funding and carry out this work.
The Index combines 12 variables from seven sources, including federal datasets and data purchased from third-party providers. Using FME, the team brings these datasets together, performs statistical and spatial analysis, and exports the information into easy-to-use tools that help decision-makers identify where assistance is needed most.
With $1.5 million to distribute in grants, the Montana Community Foundation used the Rural Capacity Index alongside applications from the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program to help guide funding decisions across the state. The Index helped the foundation look beyond Montana’s largest cities and consider communities with more limited capacity.
The foundation directed 57% of the grants in this initiative to low-capacity communities, illustrating how this information can help funders reach places that may otherwise be overlooked, and recognizing the philanthropic gap often overlooking rural communities.
Building repeatable workflows
Beyond supporting individual projects, FME has changed how Headwaters Economics manages its data workflows. Scott describes one of the biggest advantages as visibility: “When I first saw an FME workspace, I thought, ‘This is brilliant because it’s self-documenting.’”
Using a shared folder, Scott and Tara pass workspaces back and forth, running them as needed against common data sources. Annotations and bookmarks make workflows easier to understand and navigate, while error checking helps simplify troubleshooting compared with their previous process of debugging custom Python code.
The team can update, share, and reuse these workflows as projects evolve, making it easier to refresh the data behind its public tools.
Extending the reach of a small team
With a team of 15, Headwaters Economics delivers tools and research that serve communities across the United States. FME helps the organization bring complex datasets together and prepare them for analysis, giving its small data team the ability to deliver and maintain tools used far beyond the organization.
This works gives community leaders the information they need to understand local risks, prioritize projects, and make a case for funding.
