Mission-driven organizations should have access to actionable insights to inform their decisions – our communities depend on it. As Executive Director of Neighborhood Nexus, Tommy Pearce is working to do just that. By continuously deepening its understanding of how leaders make decisions, maintaining relationships with state data sources and delivering accessible data tools to the public, the Nexus team is building a culture of data-informed decision-making among Georgia’s social sector.
With a background in social work and human services – teaching ESL at a refugee resettlement agency, conducting shelter intake and street outreach at a homeless services agency – Tommy gained insights into the lived experience of our most vulnerable community members and the structural barriers they face. To address these issues at a systemic level, he shifted his focus to organizational capacity building to strengthen the organizations serving our communities. Prior to joining Neighborhood Nexus, Tommy was a strategic planning and market research consultant for the Georgia Center for Nonprofits, working with hundreds of nonprofits and boards across the state to maximize their impact with data.
Neighborhood Nexus is achieving its mission with three main programs: Creating open-access data infrastructure like Data Nexus for anyone to find and visualize community data for free, capacity building and training programs for nonprofit professionals, and consulting for organizations in need of custom tools and data partners.
Tommy has a Master of Social Work from University of Pittsburgh and a History degree from Georgia Southern University. He’s a lifelong Gwinnetian, where he currently resides with his wife, two daughters and stacks of books he will never finish.
Tommy will present on Neighborhood Nexus’ collaborative efforts to pull data for real-time insights.
