DatosLab Blog · Data Engineering
Your organizing roster is sitting in BigQuery and your team is too scared to open it
· By Maria del Rosario Palacios · 317 words
Personal capacity.
Last month, a colleague at a small voting rights org in Atlanta sent me a panicked Slack message. Her board chair had asked a simple question: how many of our 2024 volunteers came back in 2026?
The data was in BigQuery. The org was paying for BigQuery. Nobody on staff could write the query.
They paid a consultant $1,200 to answer one question.
This is a pattern I see constantly in nonprofits run by and for communities of color. We have the data. We pay for the platform. The skills gap sits at the keyboard.
The labor market has been telling us this for years. SQL appears in more than 60% of data analyst job postings, and SQL-strong analysts earn a 15–30% wage premium over those without (NeuroNomixer, 2026; FindADataJob). And Hispanic workers make up 17% of the total U.S. workforce but only 8% of the STEM workforce (Pew Research, 2021).
The pipeline problem is not a "we couldn't find the talent" problem. It's a "we never trained the talent we already have" problem.
We built two SQL courses for the people I'm describing.
The first, SQL Foundations for Data Work, is two focused hours. The second, Intro to SQL for Organizing with BigQuery, is six 20-minute modules built around a real organizing question — the kind your ED actually asks.
By the end you can:
- Write a SELECT and JOIN that pulls volunteer data across two tables.
- Calculate retention rates.
- Filter by county.
- Document your query so the next person on your team can read it.
- Cost-estimate a BigQuery job before you accidentally run a $40 query.
Free. Six 20-minute modules. You can do it during one work week, twenty minutes a day, on lunch break.
If your team has ever paid a consultant to answer a question your data could already answer, take it.