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 nine and continues to take on projects that help people better understand the implications of demographic change across the state of NC.
Wei Gu, M.A.
Joanne Brosh, Ph.D.
Carolina Demography has several initiatives that assist journalists in using Census data and other data sets. Our staff:
Our material helped the NC Local News Lab Fund better understand and then prioritize their funding to better serve existing and future grant recipients in North Carolina. The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund was established in 2017 to strengthen…
The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), which serves over 160,000 students, is the largest public school district in North Carolina. To better prepare for school siting needs, WCPSS asked Carolina Demography to project long-range forecasts (10-year) of school enrollment…
Alamance Community College (ACC) is a public community college with campuses in Graham, North Carolina and Burlington, North Carolina. They asked Carolina Demography to help them understand what they would need to know in order to plan for recruitment, enrollment…
Your support is critical to our mission of measuring, understanding, and predicting population change and its impact. Donate to Carolina Demography today.
