Subscribe to 51精品视频wire Today
Get the most interesting and important stories from the 51精品视频.United Way and 51精品视频 Partnership Enhances Regional Database Highlighting Community Needs
United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania and 51精品视频 collaborated to add PA 211 Southwest data to the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC) open data portal in an effort to provide a better understanding about community needs in the region.
The WPRDC was created in 2015 and is managed by the聽51精品视频 Center for Urban and Social Research, in partnership with聽Allegheny County聽and the聽City of 51精品视频sburgh. This new partnership adds the latest information from United Way鈥檚 211 Counts dashboard directly to the WPRDC open data portal every day.聽The addition of 211鈥檚 data to the data already shared by the county鈥檚 911 and city鈥檚 311 systems provides a more comprehensive look at requests for services in the region.
鈥淯nited Way's PA 211 Southwest鈥檚 partnership with WPRDC enhances their聽trusted database and provides聽an even greater聽centralized resource聽for information about the聽region," said Michele Sandoe,聽senior director of United Way's PA 211 Southwest. "Through this transparent聽sharing of聽up-to-date information, we are helping people find and use information to help their communities."
Over the last 10 years, United Way鈥檚 PA 211 Southwest has answered 1,102,843 requests for help (650,887 requests via call or text and 451,956 inquiries online). The top three needs across the region are consistently related to housing, utility assistance and access to food.
鈥淪haring the 211 data as open data enables people to start to look at service demand in context with other information. For example, people can now make a map of requests for food assistance by ZIP code聽and overlay that with information on grocery stores and food bank locations without first having to transcribe or scrape the data from the 211 dashboard,鈥 said Robert Gradeck, project director for the WPRDC. 鈥淭his is also a great opportunity for us to use highly relevant community level data in our efforts to build data literacy, and gives students and researchers another important dataset for research and teaching.鈥
If you or someone you know in the region needs help financially or with basic needs, contact PA 211 Southwest by dialing 2-1-1, texting your zip code to 898-211, visiting the , or accessing the .