What We Do

Patchwork Nation is a reporting project of the Jefferson Institute that aims to explore what is happening in the United States by examining different kinds of communities over time. The effort uses demographic, voting and cultural data to cluster and organize communities into “types of place.” Patchwork divides America's 3,141 counties into 12 community types based characteristics, such as income level, racial composition, employment and religion. It also breaks the nation’s 435 congressional districts into nine categories, using the same data points and clustering techniques. You can read about the methodology of the project on the methodology page.

Launched to cover the 2008 election and originally developed and hosted with the Christian Science Monitor, Patchwork Nation has evolved to cover more communities and more topics, focusing on the economy and culture as well as politics. The project represents an unprecedented collaboration of the Jefferson Institute with the NewsHour, the Christian Science Monitor and WNYC Radio as well as local public broadcasting stations.

Citizen bloggers in selected Patchwork Nation communities contribute stories - what they are seeing, hearing and reading - about the issues that impact their lives and the lives of those around them. Visitors to the site can also contribute their own views by submitting their photos to the Patchwork Nation Flickr group, uploading a video to YouTube or writing an article.

The interactive map helps break down national data to analyze how it impacts communities. And the graphic visualization tool lets users see data charted and graphed by county, congressional district, or state. It puts the data in the hands of the user, allowing him or her to compare different data sets and explore national data county-by-county.

When combined, these different layers will create a picture of how the country is faring through the prism of these communities. We recognize many people may see their county or district and think, "That is not what it is like here," and we agree that breakdowns are not the perfect way to measure community. We chose counties and districts as our organizing ideas because of the availability of data and because, like it or not, they are government-recognized entities with their own governments, representatives and often their own subcultures. While not perfect, these datasets do create an image of the United States that is more than red and blue states, but instead represent a new way of looking at the country at this time of change.

This project was funded by the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization based in Miami, Fla., and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.