As a hungry person, I want to find a FOOD BANK, so that I can get food

[abquirarte]

dAs a hungry person, I want to find a FOOD BANK, so that I can get food

Content Type

Location, Calculator

Our assumptions, what we want to test/learn

• We assume there is an accurate list of food banks out there and that people care that it is not always a government funded entity. We assume people know what 211 is.
• We assume people will want to get a text of the closest food bank.
• We will learn if people that truly really need a service like this and if it can inform future conversations around homelessness and other statewide issues.

Baseline

- https://www.cdss.ca.gov/food-banks
- Speed

- Accessibility
(Check for mobile and desktop, slowest speed, include score, use Lighthouse in dev tools to trigger an audit on page, see for walk through cagov/Alpha#68 (comment) )

- Readability
(Use http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ and take a screenshot include grade)
Hemingway score is grade 11 as of 01/13/2020

Process Status (add links, attachments, DRI, and Github issues)

• Content Research document
• User Research Doc
• Content Prototype document
• Design Prototype
• Fact Check
• Accessible
• Responsive
• User Tested User Test Food Bank Prototype #46
• Iterating
• Shipped
• Translated
• End to End Testing
• Live
• Production Testing

[tdooner]

Hey team, looking good! I was curious to check it out and noticed that there are no food banks listed in San Francisco county, but a lot of them listed in Oakland. Is the data accurate?

[aaronhans]

Thanks for pointing this out @tdooner!

We definitely don't have a comprehensive list yet. I pulled from the API responses I saw the maps making on foodnow.net and lafoodbank.org so far. I am gong to scrape foodpantries.org and we were going to put the data we have in an API in https://github.com/cagov/API. but we'd love to hear any suggestions you have on managing this data. Is there a better API that exists doing this already you are aware of? We'd be happy to contribute to another data source but if one isn't available we'll stand up the API. Are there any better data sources we should be looking at?

[tdooner]

I think resource discovery is one of the Civic Tech Hard Problems™. My understanding is that there are existing 211 systems that suck (their business model is to be the destination where people go for the info, so they're not happy to expose it via API) and then there are new 211 systems which are slowly making inroads, but nowhere near California.

The biggest Brigade project I've seen to tackle this problem is Hack for LA's Food Oasis. It looks like they maintain the list manually. Its authors presented about it at a CFA workshop (starts at ~16:30).

Sorry I don't have an answer here, this is one of those problems that's fundamentally hard to solve with technology.

[aaronhans]

Thanks @tdooner food oasis looks like an excellent resource, appreciate the help!