Mapping community needs, reaching low-income families

Our Community Resources system not only helps low-income families find social services, it also provides an ongoing community needs assessment.  All our Community Resources contracts include regular reporting of user demographics, needs, and service requests.  We recently completed a new usage report for the City of Pomona's pomonafamilyresources.org system.

In this most recent report we mapped the locations of where the requests for services came from throughout the city, as shown in the accompanying map.  According to U.S. Census data, there are greater concentrations of low-income families in the south-eastern area of the city.  We were encouraged to see that the requests for services on the pomonafamilyresources.org system came mostly from the areas we would expect based on the Census's demographic indicators.

While this may seem an obvious finding, it actually is positive, and not necessarily intuitive.  The fact that our users come from areas where there is greater need, and the data shows we are reaching very low-income families (50% of whom identified as homeless according to the McKinney-Vento definition over the summer months), demonstrates that web-based technology can aid very low-income users.

It is heartening to know we are reaching people in need.  While statistics can tell the aggregate story, the following sentence one of our users put into the system's keyword search box drives home the human element of the work we are doing

I need a place to live for my daughter and the baby on the way

In our partnership with the City of Pomona, we are not only helping those in need, but we are better collecting the necessary information to learn how to help people better.