Peace-Work is a volunteer cooperative of statisticians, data scientists and other researchers applying analytics to issue-driven advocacy. Peace-Work was established in 2014 by a group of analytic colleagues with a long history in individual statistical advocacy. An all-volunteer organization, Peace-Work projects are often in the area of academic and policy research, with volunteers as likely to be found working with government economic data to write a position paper for publication as to work hand-in-hand with a social justice organization. With a practice focusing on issue-driven advocacy, projects have included human trafficking, education performance metrics, root cause analysis of homelessness, the impact of racial bias and descriptive statistics of privilege, among others.

Peace-Work operates by connecting volunteers with organizations and datasets, often from governments and other official sources, to address issues volunteers care about deeply. With no full-time staff, larger statistical projects are broken into small pieces to accommodate volunteers busy schedules. Peace-Work has recently begun sponsoring events at analytic conferences. Called “Distributed Justice Events”, these activities invite conference participants to contribute volunteer hours during the conference on projects targeting local issues.
 

While volunteers rely on the software tools of their own choosing, SAS is used in many projects. Peace-Work actively promotes the use of SAS University Edition as a powerful analytic tool with extensive statistical, machine learning and big data capabilities available to their researchers for free.