PHILADELPHIA — Today, the City’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (OIA) announced the release of the new digital Language Services Usage dashboard, an interactive dashboard that displays the preferred language services used by residents when accessing City programs. The data illustrated in the dashboard was collected by the Language Access Philly Program during the last fiscal year, from July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022.

“As a Welcoming City, our goal is to ensure that City of Philadelphia programs, resources, and policies are accessible to everyone, including refugee and immigrant communities,” said Mayor Jim Kenney. “Language access services make it easier to connect with and support Philadelphia’s diverse communities in an intentional and meaningful way, and we are excited to not only share but build on these efforts.”

To create the dashboard and share its data, OIA is partnering with CityGeo, a team within the Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT) that leverages data and technology to improve government efficiency and support equity-focused initiatives.

“I am excited that through this partnership with CityGeo we are releasing the Language Services Usage Dashboard to the public for the first time ever,” said Amy Eusebio, Executive Director of the Philadelphia Office of Immigrant Affairs. “We invite our community partners, residents, journalists, and others to utilize the dashboard as a resource and learn how the City is supporting residents with language services.”

The data is meant to serve as a tool for researchers, journalists, community organizations, and others interested in trends based on the language services provided by public employees when interacting with the linguistically diverse public. Language services include telephonic interpretation, in-person or remote professional interpreters, and document translation. Moreover, the dashboard invites Philadelphians to get familiar with the variety of languages used in the City.

OIA also publicly shared the data for download and provided metadata through the City’s Open Data Program, which allows individuals outside of government to use this data in their own analysis.

OIA will continue to release updates on the dashboard and relevant data at the end of each fiscal year.