About us
We help people make sense of their communities
Carolina Demography is made up of demographic researchers, evaluators, spatial analysts, coders, designers, and storytellers. Together, we provide people with the data and analysis they need to make sense of population-level changes.
Collectively, we have decades of experience making population estimates and forecasts, analyzing population-level and economic trends, and communicating that data back out into the world in a way that’s easy to understand and act upon. Our work informs decision-making, evaluation, and policy across North Carolina, where we serve organizations and people in all 100 counties.
We are fortunate to be housed within the Carolina Population Center (CPC), one of the oldest and most distinguished population centers in the country. It was Paul Voss, then the interim director of CPC, who proposed building an applied demography unit within the center in 2012.
Modeled after the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the vision for Carolina Demography was to help people and organizations across NC better understand the dynamic and rapidly changing state. UNC’s Office of Research provided seed money to fund the research consulting unit for six months.
Rebecca Tippett, Carolina Demography’s founding director, joined CPC in 2013. Working closely with CPC’s leadership, she began meeting with local and state government officials, businesses, non-for-profit organizations, and people across the state to understand what questions they had about their rapidly changing population. Early projects included population projections and delivering presentations on migration patterns across NC.
Today, Carolina Demography has grown to a team of seven and continues to take on projects that help people better understand the implications of demographic change across the state of NC.
Carolina Demography has several initiatives that assist journalists in using Census data and other data sets. Our staff:
In 2020, the NC Counts Coalition provided funding to more than 60 NC-based organizations working to reach the communities most at-risk of being undercounted in the 2020 Census. The Coalition had previously worked with Carolina Demography to create a map…
Completing the FAFSA is strongly and positively associated with postsecondary enrollment. An analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that 88% of high school seniors who completed a FAFSA in 2012-13 had attended college by February…
Background Creating structure around data Our clients were, in their words “swimming in data soup.” They often had to collaborate together on county and town-level projects, and wanted to ensure that they were using numbers from the same data sources…
