  Understanding the community conditions that best support universal access and
improved childhood outcomes allows ultimately to improve decision-making in the
areas of planning and investment across the early stages of childhood
development. Here we describe two different data-driven approaches to
visualizing the lived experiences of children throughout the City of Surrey,
combining data derived from both public and private sources. In one approach,
we find specifically that the Early Development Instrument measuring childhood
vulnerabilities across varying domains can be used to cluster neighborhoods,
and that census variables can help explain similarities between neighborhoods
within these clusters. In our second approach, we use program registration data
from the City of Surrey's Community and Recreation Services Division. We also
find a critical age of entry and exit for each program related to early
childhood development and beyond, and find that certain neighborhoods and
recreational programs have larger retention rates than others. This report
details the journey of using data to tell the story of these neighborhoods, and
provides a lens to which community initiatives can be strategically crafted
through their use.
