When examining how individuals and households are faring in the economy, there’s no lack of robust readings to draw conclusions from. Data on inflation, wage growth, or unemployment, for example, can all reveal important underlying trends.
But bigger data sets often lag, needing months or years to be compiled before being released, making it much tougher to know what’s happening in local communities in real time, says Nicole Summers-Gabr, a senior researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. In an effort to get around this challenge, Summers-Gabr along with William M. Rodgers III, the St. Louis Fed’s vice president for research, sought to see what conclusions they could draw from data on 211 calls for resource referrals.
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“The biggest issue whenever somebody is trying to make issue decisions on the ground is being able to have local level data,” says Summers-Gabr. “A few months can make a big difference when we’re looking at all of the different challenges that people are experiencing day to day. That’s what makes this data really innovative.”
The United Way supports 211, which is a free and confidential service where callers can be connected with resources for housing, utilities, food, disaster relief, health care, or transportation. Rodgers says the data on its referrals carries a “great richness” when trying to understand what’s happening at a granular level.
“You really get a real time estimate or portrait of community conditions, whether it be people being able to meet their housing expenditures, their food expenditures,” he says. “What’s also great about this 211 data is that it can also shine a light on the impacts of economic shocks.”
Both Summers-Gabr and Rodgers caution that 211 is no replacement for what is broadly gathered by governmental statistical agencies, but rather something that can act as a strong supplement.
When mapping the percent change in requests between 2024 and 2025, Rodgers and Summers-Gabr noted strong alignment with key events stressing out households. There was a spike in requests for disaster relief in the immediate months following the May 16 tornado, as well as for food assistance during last year’s government shutdown, when it wasn’t clear that families who rely on SNAP benefits would receive them.
Rodgers adds that outside of such economic shocks, there are still people consistently seeking assistance, which can reveal underlying conditions for households at the lower end of the income spectrum.
“I like to combine this analysis with my analysis that shows the unemployment rate for the metro area has been at or below 5 percent for a good number of years,” he says. “To me, this is suggesting that structural hurdles and barriers still matter even in an economy or a labor market where it’s presumed as being really tight.”
A strong economy or solid economic growth doesn’t entirely solve the challenges many households face, he concludes.
”What I like about this 211 data is it complements these other data sources and it goes deeper than just, OK, well, we know this person just lost their job,” Rodgers says. “There are many impacts that a job loss can have. [It] can mean I need referrals for trying to help getting a new job, or I need referrals for trying to find food.”
Summers-Gabr suggests the data on referral requests from 211 might also be able to answer some of the pressing questions she gets regularly, like the real impact of data centers on utility prices.
“If you’re able to track when a data center comes online and see if there are requests for help around utilities, then that might be an indicator that prices are really pressing on people’s wallets,” she says.
Data on the resources those calling 211 need may also reveal the fragile position many households are in now, compared to the past, Rodgers says.
“We’re in a society now where economic shocks such as natural disasters seem to be more frequent and also at a larger scale,” he says. “People used to be able to cover or absorb the cost of these shocks, but increasingly because they are more frequent and more ferocious, it has become harder for individuals, families, neighborhoods, cities, and counties and even regions to be able to absorb these costs and have a rapid recovery.”
