Find Us at NTC 2025

This year at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in Baltimore, MD (April 16-18), The People’s Data Project will debut a session called “Data Rights for Advocacy: Lessons and Stories from the Field”. The session will provide participants with the fundamentals of data rights for organizers and share real-world stories of data rights in practices based on experiments with Gulf Coast environmental justice groups.

Nonprofits play an essential role in helping communities defend themselves from unjust data extraction that fuels harmful systems. Many nonprofits serve as community organizations that actively build trust with community residents. Trusted intermediaries can start putting data rights principles into practice in order to both protect personal and community data and educate their communities about why data rights matter.

Integrating data rights principles into nonprofit organizing and advocacy has a number of impactful benefits. First, nonprofits that already work toward social justice as part of their core mission will benefit from shifting to a rights-based data strategy that aligns with their other values, as opposed to borrowing and replicating data practices from corporate or government sectors. Second, nonprofits that are advocating for specific policy interventions or reforms can benefit from considering the way data plays a role in perpetuating harm or injustice, since data is often used as a silent tool to hardcode bias into institutional systems.

Find us at NTC 2025 to learn more about how your organization can begin implementing data rights into your strategy or email katya@peoplesdataproject.org.