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Accessible resources for recent parolees

Open danrubins opened this issue 8 years ago • 2 comments

It's not a good thing for anyone when people return to prison - even ignoring the significant personal and social costs, it's just expensive for taxpayers. There are plenty of challenges for parolees, but also lots of resources that can help. Unfortunately, that help is incredibly hard to access.

For example, consider that even in the hotbed of technology, Silicon Valley, the way to find resources looks like a really awful phonebook with entries like this:

211- Santa Clara County Phone: No Address Provided No City Provided, California 00000-0000 website: www.211.org

There's no description provided, and only very high level categorization ("Transportation Services" in this case). What's worse, even after Googling "parolee resources california", it takes at least 4 page transitions to even get to the list. Nothing here is mobile friendly - and this is for, arguably, the most technologically advanced region in the country.

For the Tech For Justice Hackathon, I'd like to work on a (free) Web, Android, and iOS app to reimagine the workflow of finding resources, consolidate geographically and technologically diverse datasets of resources, apply community curation and feedback, as well as privacy-safe geolocation to find relevant resources.

danrubins avatar Nov 04 '16 21:11 danrubins