SOCIAL SERVICE REFERRALS
The right social service referral can change a life.
However, the online tools designed to provide social workers and individuals with information about social services are often out-of-date, hard to navigate, available only in English, and not mobile-friendly.
Why? If there can be hundreds of user-friendly, multilingual websites and apps for finding great restaurant or hotel, recommendations, why shouldn’t there be helpful online tools for finding open food pantries, rent assistance application organizations, or Spanish-language career advising?
Communities deserve better tools, created with them and for them.
Most social workers rely on physical binders, printed PDFs, and memory to provide referrals, because online tools tend to be unreliable, unaccessible, and unfriendly for social workers and their clients.
At the start of COVID-19 in the US in March 2020, we created a map of all 1,000+ school meal site serving Bay Area families.
It received half a million views and was shared through school district websites and the local news. It catalyzed unforgettable conversations and partnerships with school districts, community-based organizations, clinic networks, and parents. We continued to update the school meals data for the entire duration of COVID-19 grab-and-go school meals.
Along the way, conversations with social workers and school staff informed us of the critical gaps amongst most community resource gaps, in terms of information reliability and technological and language accessibility. We were inspired to build something better: BayAreaCommunity.org (BAC).
After building a first draft of BAC, we conducted 20 compensated needs-finding and user testing interviews with 20 Bay Area social workers and predominantly Spanish-speaking public school parents whose children access school meals.
Their insights reveal the many challenges that continue to face families, unsupported by poor community service resource maps and lists:
“Muchos sitios no tiene [Español]. Es útil que puedo hacer un búsqueda en mi propio idioma”
— Bay Area Mom
“[BAC] 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
“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
“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.”
— Bay Area Mom
“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
We are working to make online social service referral tools more trustworthy, effective, safe, and friendly.
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BayAreaCommunity.org
We mapped every school meal site serving Bay Area families for 18 months - from the beginning to end of Grab and Go school meals sites. Our first map got half a million views, and we ultimately built a mobile-friendly, multilingual website to share the data, and also shared it with No Kid Hungry to populate the National Free Meal Finder Map and Texting Hotline.
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Meals4Families
We are partnering with Meals4Families, a school meals map website for school districts and parents, to help built state-specific guides for federal benefits and additional food resources.
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One Degree
We are partnering with One Degree to help update their 11,000 Bay Area social service resources, that support their thousands of Bay Area members.
