BayAreaCommunity.org — 6 Month Impact Report
A retrospective review of BAC’s first 6 months
(May 18, 2020 - November 18, 2020)
unBox and BayAreaCommunity.org (BAC) began as separate initiatives, but their mission-alignment and overlapping members brought them together as one. BAC, now a project within unBox, has helped catalyze our relationships with Bay Area partners and community members, further aligning our mission with the real and present needs of the people we hope to work with, learn from, and support, on the ground.
Why’d we build BayAreaCommunity.org?
The COVID-19 pandemic brought on more than a public health crisis. Across the world, and in our local Bay Area communities, the pandemic brought with it an economic catastrophe, causing widespread income loss and unemployment, business closures, and skyrocketing food and housing insecurity. This played out in overwhelming numbers of government benefit applications, mile-long food pantry breadlines, endless cash assistance waitlists. Some people found themselves accessing free community resources they never believed they would be seeking. For others, the pandemic merely exacerbated problems they had struggled with long before COVID-19.
In March, California began sheltering-in-place, and the schools closed. School closures meant that many families and children lost a crucial part of their social safety net, including access to daily school meals. A 2017 study found that 3 in 5 low-income parents find it difficult to afford food for their kids outside of school. This pressure has increased during the pandemic. In response to nationwide economic hardship and urgent child food insecurity, the USDA granted numerous school meal waivers to districts nationwide. Schools were allowed to serve not only students in their district, but all children in the community, and had flexibility in where, when, and how they served meals.
As a group of college students rushed off campus into a surreal and sobering spring break, we searched through the tragic headlines and uplifting success stories to piece together the complex story of local community hardship, and resilience, during COVID-19. Some of us had just left the Stanford Data Challenge Lab course, mobilized with skills to engage in social impact data science. Some of us had taken part in campus-wide organizing efforts, fundraising and advocating to support students’ and contracted workers’ basic needs, and we wanted to translate this work to off-campus community service. It occurred to us that, given the expanded and rapidly-evolving multitude of school meal service options available to families (regardless of where they lived, or what school district they attended, families could pick up meals at their preferred and most convenient time and location) there should be an accessible tool to help parents find information about these changing meal service sites. We couldn’t find one. There were no complete, regularly updated, Bay Area-wide school meals maps for the pandemic. And certainly, none that were mobile-friendly. Knowing that many families accessing free school meal sites may be low-income, juggling childcare, potentially newly unemployed, non-native-English-speaking, relying on a low-cost mobile phone as their primary Internet-enabled device, or a combination of several of the above—we made a simple bilingual school meals map that worked for phones.
There were no complete, regularly updated, Bay Area-wide school meals maps for the pandemic. We made a simple bilingual map that worked for phones.
We put school meals on the map.
Our team got to work. We made a Google Spreadsheet and added entries for every meal site in the Bay Area. Using these data points, we whipped up a quick Google MyMaps site to make the information widely accessible. We notified our partners at Big Local News, founded and led by one of our project’s earliest supporters, Cheryl Phillips, who publicized our map to several local news agencies. Within two weeks, our map received half a million views. School district websites displayed our site, and we were featured in SF Gate, Mercury News, Palo Alto Online, Stanford News, Local News Matters, Stanford Pyjama Talks, and Stanford Media.
Within two weeks, our map received half a million views.
As our tools reached more and more Bay Area communities, we had the opportunity to form incredible partnerships. We attended a Bay Area Child Nutrition roundtable hosted by Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, after which fellow attendee and Program Manager for Stanford Pediatric Advocacy, Melanie Ramirez, reached out. We forged a partnership, contributing our volunteer resources to help her program create and update resource flyers, which she distributed to partners across Stanford Hospital’s patient networks and was shared on county websites.
Building beyond school meals
Conversations with school districts, CBOs, and community members revealed that school meals were not the only community resource for which there lacked an updated, user-friendly, accessible website. There were no centralized, accurate, multi-resource, multilingual, mobile-friendly resource maps for navigating the Bay Area’s many community resource offerings. We mobilized to fill this gap.
To build this database, we needed all hands on deck. And more hands. We received a wellspring of student volunteer support from across the campuses of USF, Berkeley, and Stanford, including students from the Stanford Law COVID Pro Bono Program, Cardinal Free Clinics, and Pacific Free Clinics. We recruited high school students from Gunn High School, Palo Alto High School, and Castilleja High school, who have each logged hundreds of community service hours working on our database. We fostered a partnership with Code for San Jose, a local chapter of Code for America’s nationwide volunteer network. It took a village. We expanded our database to include food stamp-accepting stores, and resources for medical care, mental health, cash assistance, and legal aid. The goals for our project, and the needs it sought to meet, were outgrowing Google MyMaps.
We sought a more customizable platform for our website, that could grow in response to the information needs of the community. We also refused to compromise on mobile-friendliness. Partnering with Code for America’s North Carolina volunteer chapter, Code for Chapel Hill, that had created a similar asset map (NC COVID Support) to serve their community, we created a user-friendly mobile interface. That was May 18th, 2020. Charting forward, it’s been six months since that interface went live.
Our map is reaching the community.
3,608 unique users
2 minutes and 30 seconds per visit
Most users from San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Mountain View, and Oakland
In the past 6 months, we’ve had 3,608 unique users. Our biggest usage spike occurred at the end of September, after we had recreated our school meals map in response to the USDA extension of school meal waivers for fall, and publicized the updated map to partners and the community. This is also when we were gaining our highest percentage of new users. The average user explores our site for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. In descending order of traffic, we receive the most users from San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Mountain View, and Oakland.
Our community partners help us build and share our website.
As our resource has evolved, so have our relationships with local partners. We continue to work with Stanford Pediatric Advocacy, and are in active communication with Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, LifeMoves Homeless Shelter, United Way Bay Area, Code for America (the creators of the GetCalFresh SNAP Application), Ravenswood Family Health Clinic, SF-Marin Food Bank, the Santa Clara County Re-entry Center, and more. Our collaboration with SFUSD has been enriching and eye-opening; their nutrition services department helps us keep a pulse on the needs of SF parents and families. They also notify us of meal service updates and opportunities to volunteer, which we publicize to our members. Anne Moertel, Design and Communication Strategist for SFUSD, shared, "The work unBox is doing to build awareness of essential resources is critical. As a school district, we depend on partners to amplify our services to reach more families. During the pandemic, these partnerships are needed more than ever before."
"The work unBox is doing to build awareness of essential resources is critical. As a school district, we depend on partners to amplify our services to reach more families. During the pandemic, these partnerships are needed more than ever before." - Anne Moertel, Design and Communication Strategist for SFUSD
We are proud to source data provided by the Berkeley Ecology Center (a map of CalFresh-accepting farmers’ markets) and FindCOVIDTesting.org, and look forward to building more local data partnerships. We hope our efforts can contribute to a shared and collaborative information ecosystem, in which volunteers, local governments, CBOs, academic institutions, technology innovators, and citizens, contribute to a pooled database of accurate, easily share-able, freely accessible social service information.
BAC’s data, conveyed through the NKH Free Meals Texting hotline alone, provided 939 families with information about nearby school meals. 290 of those texts were through the Spanish texting hotline.
Beyond the Bay Area, we have fostered an invaluable partnership with No Kid Hungry (NKH), part of the nationwide anti-hunger nonprofit organization Share Our Strength. NKH has created a national Free Meals Texting Hotline and Free Meal Finder Map, a resource used by thousands of kids and parents to find free school meals. NKH recognized that BayAreaCommunity.org maintained the most up-to-date and complete school meals data for the Bay Area. Every two weeks on a rolling basis, we update the Bay Area regions of NKH’s texting hotline and map, with our BAC school meals data. BAC’s data, conveyed through the NKH Free Meals Texting hotline alone, provided 939 families with information about nearby school meals. 290 of those texts were through the Spanish texting hotline. Chelsea MacCormack, Associate for the No Kid Hungry Share Our Strength Center for Best Practices, attested, “Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign relies on unBox’s clean, consistent and accurate data to fill out our Find Free Meals Map and Texting Hotline. unBox accommodated our data structure and intake methods to create a system custom to us. This customization saved us time and made the merging of data sets easy and convenient. We highly recommend working with unBox.”
“Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign relies on unBox’s clean, consistent and accurate data to fill out our Find Free Meals Map and Texting Hotline. unBox accommodated our data structure and intake methods to create a system custom to us. This customization saved us time and made the merging of data sets easy and convenient. We highly recommend working with unBox.”
In the future, we hope to further leverage our database for advocacy-informing research. We have analyzed our data to support the advocacy goals of the California Nutrition Policy Institute and Nourish CA (then, California Food Policy Advocates), which included increasing school meal funding in the CA state budget, extending USDA school meal waivers, and expanding P-EBT benefits outreach and benefit amounts.
We are constantly learning from our users.
Our primary focus, and the mission of BAC, remains rooted in the needs of low-income Bay Area residents, and the social workers who help them connect with resources. Since the start of BAC, we have interviewed 9 low-income Bay Area residents, 8 of whom were predominantly Spanish-speaking, and 11 social workers, from three Bay Area organizations. These interviews would not have been possible without the support of the Stanford Sustainable Cities class, whose students helped us create an interview consent document and guide, conduct sessions, and transform interview insights into actionable website improvements. The Sustainable Cities class honorarium, provided to unBox as a community partner, and a generous budget from the Stanford Law COVID Pro Bono program, enabled us to compensate interviewees for their time.
Quotes from our users:
“I just love how user friendly it is. This is great!” - Bay Area CBO Social Worker
“They didn’t have anything like this when I first started the job, and it would have been really helpful. When I started the job ten years ago, I was making binders. I should be better about referring this to my interns.” - Bay Area Elementary School Social Worker
“Just having these differences in languages at the top makes a huge difference. It’s more official, it’s more inclusive. It just feels more welcoming.” - Bay Area High School Counselor
“I’m really excited about this, actually. When our supervisor sent it out, I was like, ‘I would definitely use this’. I’m excited to have a central landing spot. Information is shared by one person asking another; there are few resources where information is shared” -Bay Area Elementary School Social Worker
“These are the types of things that we need, as people in schools. We refer to people, but I like to know what we’re referring to. Coming across this page and seeing that it’s on the way to help families makes me proud and hopeful.” - Bay Area Middle School Counselor
“It showed me things that I even didn’t know about. I think that it has big potential, especially if this can continue post-COVID. Social workers are always trying to put together spreadsheets and resource links. Something that is clickable and searchable would have much more long-term utility for us. As it stands, I think it is much better than anything we are using now. These things tend to spread more by word-of-mouth. The more people who can see this and see how useful it is, can help get it to other families and social workers” - Bay Area Elementary School Social Worker
“Of all the websites of the city, BayAreaCommunity.org should be publicized! How can this site be brought further up to the top of a Google search, or to more people's attentions? There isn't a website as complete as this one. To find resources for Calfresh and WIC, there are separate websites for each. It's nice that with BAC, the different resource types are all in one place.” - Low-income Bay Area Mom
“Muchos sitios no tiene. Es útil que puedo hacer un búsqueda en mi propio idioma” - Low-income Bay Area Mom
User testing highlighted several ways in which our website fills urgent gaps. It also illuminated key areas for improvement. First, the interviews affirmed the importance of providing multilingual information. Translating our website into the Bay Area’s four most common non-English languages (Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, and Vietnamese) with translations from our fluent volunteers, was a goal and feature of our website since the beginning. Other available resources are solely in English, only support one other language, or rely on Google Translate. From here, however, we recognize the need to ensure our resource is not only translated, but lists the language capabilities of the resource providers we list. This is key information for many Bay Area resource-seekers, and a part of every social worker’s referral research.
The interviews also affirmed that viewing resources as a map is helpful. Other websites often only show resources as a list. Interviewees had never come across a map of WIC-accepting stores, nor one that showed all CalFresh and WIC-accepting stores’ updated senior hours and curbside pick-up and delivery information. They also attested that no other Bay Area school meals database was as up-to-date and comprehensive as BAC. We were urged, however, to also include additional crisis and emergency resources related to medical, legal, cash assistance, and mental health resources. We received feedback on how best to display benefits enrollment information prominently. Our team is now working to manifest our interviewees' feedback directly in the BAC website’s next version.
Over the past six months, we have been enduringly grateful for the opportunity to help give back to our local community. The resources listed in our database, giving out food, providing COVID-19 tests, and selling food-stamp-eligible-produce, form the core of our local social safety net; we aim to help ensure their essential services are reaching those in need. Over the course of our BAC journey, we have learned countless lessons, made new friends, and fostered deep local connections we never expected to forge amidst a global pandemic. We are excited to continue making our resource as useful, inclusive, and accessible as possible, and look forward to an ever more impactful future.
It takes a community, to create a community resource. Thank you for your support and interest in this work.
Please reach out with inquiries, questions, and ideas—we’d love to learn from you!