Although this is the first time I am writing this letter, I do not write it as a stranger. For years, I have worked from within this organization, guided by a conviction I still hold: that data is never neutral. It carries the inequalities of the world that produced it, and, used deliberately, it can also be turned against them.

I want to be honest about where we are. This has been a year of transition for DPA, with a new Executive Director and a deliberate process of reorganization. We have used this moment to ask a harder question: what does Data-Pop Alliance need in order to continue doing work that matters, for the communities and realities it was built to serve? We didn’t arrive at something new. We arrived at a clearer version of what was already here.

We are a global research-to-action organization that uses data to diagnose, mobilize, and transform. This is a continuous cycle that has structured our work since our founding, and one we are recommitting to as the spine of everything we do. We diagnose structural inequalities using rigorous, innovative data methods. We mobilize that evidence through partnerships, training, and public engagement, so that it reaches the people and institutions positioned to act on it. And we work to transform the systems, policies, and power structures that produce inequality in the first place.

DPA works globally, because the inequalities we study do not stop at any one region’s border, and neither should the evidence we build to address them. Nonetheless, our deepest insights have consistently come from grounding our research in local realities. From there, we work outward, building partnerships wherever they strengthen that core, bringing resources, visibility, and methodological rigor into direct dialogue with the communities and researchers doing the work on the ground, wherever in the world they may be.