Website and Database Building
Organization:
California Coalition for Rural Housing VISTA Name:
Rebecca White
Program Start:
9/2006
Program End:
9/2007
Project Description:
Goal 1: Increase the capacity of rural communities and the organizations that serve them to utlize new information technologies for community development endeavors.
Goal 2: Assist in maintaining and improving on organization’s technology capacity
Goal 3: Develop and maintain a housing policy clearinghouse and searchable database for communities and community based organizations that are looking to adopt policies that will increase the stock of decent affordable housing.
Project Outcome:
In February Cal Rural Housing completed working on a 3 month project with Fresno County Community Development Division in which we provided technical assistance in developing an electronic database to track their CDBG expenditures. The County had never tracked these expenditures other then in a word document. Rebecca inputted the information we obtained in a word document into Excel, analyzed, charted and developed maps for the department. We then provided maps for a presentation to the Board of Supervisors that shows expenditures by community and by district (attached). The County should now be able to more easily track Federal funding using this database and produce charts and map in a more timely fashion. Rebecca spent a majority of her time revamping our website and upgrading our Rural Toolbox. She upgraded our old site using Drupal and developed a searchable database of more than 130 California Inclusionary Housing programs, the first of its kind in the US. The database provides summaries of characteristics for each policy. Users are able to search for these summaries by jurisdiction name or by more than 30 other variables. Rebecca also developed an introductory tutorial on using open-source desktop GIS (MapWindow) that can be used as either a GIS viewer or an advanced should be live by August-September.