ArcGIS Online Development for Bay Area SOS Meals On Wheels

Service Opportunity for Seniors (SOS) Meals On Wheels is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization committed to deliver nutritionally balanced meals to seniors. SOS Meals on Wheels is an organization that addresses the issue of senior isolation and hunger locally. SOS was founded in 1966 and the program expanded steadily over the years and currently delivers 1,800 meals daily. As an organization, it promotes nutritional health, decreases the possibility of premature institutionalization, and fosters the independence and dignity of homebound seniors in Central Alameda County and the City of Oakland. SOS is a part of a network of 5,000+ independently run local meals on wheels programs across the United States.

In order to improve their capability, SOS MOW requested the help of a GISCorps volunteer who could make detailed technical recommendations for their current database structure. Also, SOS MOW requested help with making detailed reports of their operations with the help of ArcGIS Online’s Story Mapping and Dashboard features. The goal of this project was to Geocode clients’ addresses (currently residing in an Access database) of all the locations of which meals are served. All the addresses are to be identified based on their Electoral District Boundaries (EDB). Using ArcGIS Online the addresses were visually represented using web maps. The data that is enriched was expected to be passed to the backend Access database from the web map and vice versa, whenever there were data updates.

SOS MOW also had a need to create and submit reports to a government agency to show the total number of clients served with meals. Passing information back to the Access database to enable the SOS MOW team to generate those reports for each EDB they serve was assigned to Sarawathi Emani, a volunteer from Arizona. The application developed by the volunteer allowed them to generate the total count of addresses per each jurisdiction. Another function, a search option in the web application, enabled an address search and zoom to the address location. A pop-up with information about the location of interest was enabled when clicking on each point feature. SOS MOW can also download the table from ArcGIS Online to Excel and other table formats.

Project complete