Volunteer Assisting Cross Over Community Development with visualization of spatial data

Cross Over Community Development (COCD), founded in 2016 in Dayton, Ohio, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on integrating immigrants and refugees into the community. Their mission is to advocate, educate, and facilitate connections for these families to achieve self-sufficiency and participate actively in their new communities. COCD aims to raise public awareness and improve inclusivity for immigrants and refugees.

COCD partners with local agencies to bridge education gaps, provide vocational training, promote cultural awareness, and support well-being. Their key initiatives include a culturally responsive ESL program, urban agriculture with chemical-free exotic produce, and comprehensive family mentoring with wraparound case management support and legal assistance in collaboration with the University of Dayton Legal Clinic.

Claire Daniels, a volunteer from Seattle, Washington, was selected for the project. The primary objective of the project was to raise awareness of their work in the community, and encourage members of the public to become volunteers. They wished to have a map displaying clients by both zip code and by the specific services requested by those clients. Additionally, COCD hoped to develop an internal resource that could be used for improved client management. They also requested some basic training in the form of video tutorials for their staff to become more familiar with ArcGIS Online capabilities.

COCD provided a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with client records, which was uploaded to ArcGIS Online. These records were joined to a feature layer of U.S. zip codes sourced from Esri’s Living Atlas that had filters set to display only those Ohio zip codes served by COCD. This new feature layer was used to create two parallel web applications for both public-facing and internal purposes. 

A public dashboard (Figure 1) was created using ArcGIS Dashboards with the goal of providing information to the public on COCD’s overall mission and opportunities to get involved locally.  Each zip code was represented by a pie chart. The charts’ size and proportions depended on the number of clients in that zip code and the services requested by those clients, with pop-ups informing the viewer of how many clients resided in that zip code. A larger pie chart was also formatted as a stand-alone widget that represented all clients in the current map extent. The goal of these pie charts was to allow the viewer to visualize how clients were concentrated across the service area and provide them with visuals for individual zip codes, for different regions within the service area, or the service area at large. 

A second web application (Figure 2) for staff use was created with ArcGIS Experience Builder for the purpose of serving as a client database for COCD internal users. The application merged the existing Salesforce records with a spatial component and enabled users to edit, filter, and search records by attribute fields (such as services requested) or by spatial elements (such as home address or zip code). Users can create and export reports and printable maps based on their findings. 

Claire also recorded a series of video tutorials and user guides to ensure that COCD staff had the ability to navigate ArcGIS Online interface, and to update and maintain both web applications with new data over time. In addition to the resources created during the course of the project, the overall outcome was an improved understanding among COCD staff of the general capabilities of ArcGIS Online and how it may be used to boost community involvement, advocacy and understanding.

Project Completed