Adam Martin   •   over 8 years ago

Poverty & Inequality: Yelp for Social Services

Problem: The social safety net is fragmented. There are many small social programs and individual nonprofits change priorities. The first step to a healthy social safety net is up-to-date, easy to access information about resources available. The current system requires manual intern labor to pull together updates to a database of community resources.
Intended Outcomes:
Give nonprofit workers & clients/users a better way to update social services info into an open information & referral database for social services. An app? with APIs to publish to the 211 database?
Yelp for social services. Give users a more user-friendly app to tap into 211 community services database, and give feedback/updates on services for quicker updates..
Resources (Data/Examples of Hacks):
One Degree (Y-Combinator backed): only covers San Fran, OneDegree Data Standards; TechCrunch Writeup
Code for America's "Open Referral" Initiative & Data Standards (like an Open 211)
2013 June: Durham Community Resource Database (GoogleDoc)