CEL Data Analysis
Community Endowment of Lexington
What is CEL?
The Community Endowment of Lexington (CEL) enhances the quality of life for Lexington citizens.
CEL awards grants to nonprofits and town agencies working in the areas of health and human services, arts and culture,
the environment, and community building; provides ways for donors to give back and leave a legacy; and encourages
innovative and collaborative solutions to issues facing Lexington.
However, due to the lack of advanced analyzing tools, the board didn’t have a comprehensive overview of how the grants were distributed over the years.
Thus, questions arose regarding: who needed the grants more urgently than the others and how much each organization
should be awarded etc. In order to use the grants wisely, CEL needed a powerful data analysis tool to systematically analyze all the historical grant usage.
What We Did
We decided to use our computer science skills to help them develop a grant analyzing tool by looking at
all the historical data and finding the patterns and trends of the grant needs.
The CEL town board provided a spreadsheet of data for our team to interpret.
The results would help CEL establish nonprofits that needed economic support and which financial grants to approve.
Our team used Python to code and analyze/graph data while noticing trends and patterns.
Team members would code individually and contribute ideas to each other over the weekend which built
a fundamental system allowing team members to help each other learn advanced python libraries.
Impact On Community
With our efforts, a record total of $57,850
in grants were awarded this year representing a new highmark for CEL’s grant distribution.
CEL was able to make a greater impact on our community and hence making Lexington a better place for everyone.
Using our data, CEL designed a new application procedure and received a record high number of applications for the 2021 grant cycle.
The project was the result of close collaboration, with each person programmatically completing statistics that needed to be compiled into a final package.
This allowed team members work closely with each other, improving our relationships and management skills.
It’s gratifying knowing that our efforts will help improve the well-being of our community going forward.
Created by our founding members: Everest Yang, Baoren Liu, Trevor Xing-Xie, David Zhao, Gabriel Sui, Ellen Wang, Frank Xia, Albert Lin, Kenneth Lu
This is the CEL Church Building