Meet the winner of CHR&R’s 2025 data viz challenge
Thank you to everyone who participated in our first data viz challenge! The purpose of the challenge is to communicate the structural determinants of health, or the laws, policies, and power structures that drive health outcomes.
We received outstanding submissions and are excited to spotlight the winning visual created by Allison Young:
Young's design stood out for its beauty, creativity, powerful message and effectiveness in illustrating complex structural forces. Her submission explored the connection between school funding, reading scores and health outcomes in California, which she visualized through the state flower, the California golden poppy. Young represented a structural determinant of health (school funding adequacy) as the roots of the flower, a social determinant of health (reading scores) as the stems, and county health outcomes as flourishing petals.
Young provided additional context with her submission:
"In 1971, a landmark decision by California’s Supreme Court reshaped the state’s school funding policy, aiming to reduce disparities in per-pupil spending and ‘equalize’ funding across school districts. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, greater funding improves various student outcomes such as test scores, high school graduation rates, and college attendance. State policymakers who craft funding policy for California’s schools have the power to shape these education outcomes and, in turn, population health and well-being.
Today, as California faces widening gaps in student performance, and as funding and equity in education come under attack nationwide, adequate and equitable school funding and its role in achieving health equity remains an important matter. This infographic visualizes public school funding as a structural determinant of health, with a specific focus on California counties. In addition to school funding adequacy, the visualization also includes data on reading scores, healthy days, and County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) Health Groups. Illustrating the connection between these measures highlights how policies and people in power, such as those responsible for school funding, influence social determinants of health like education access and achievement...in addition to this data-driven illustration, supplemental scatterplots and maps reinforce the association between school funding adequacy, reading scores, and health outcomes, and more broadly, the connection between power, education, and community health."
Allison Young recently graduated with a BFA in medical illustration and a minor in health communication from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She matriculated at UCLA, where she plans to start her MPH program this fall.
It is inspiring to see how people across the country are using data to create meaningful change. Explore the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute Model of Health to learn more about the impacts of structural determinants on everyone’s health. And, sign up for our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn to stay informed about CHR&R.