MomsRising: Creating a US Report Card of Family & Workplace
Support
MomsRising is a citizen advocacy and online organizing group that
focuses on issues of motherhood and family nationwide, with a
particular focus on legislation that supports children, families, and
mothers’ paid and unpaid labor. The goal of this project is to
create data and maps that help MomsRising members analyze and
disseminate information about national trends in such legislation and
policy structures. Your team will build a database (state level, for
entire US) of relevant information about presence or absence of state
laws and policies that supporting mothers and protecting them from
discrimination based on their parental status, and use this database to
create one or more simple models that create a composite measurement of
how ‘friendly’ or ‘unfriendly’ each state is
with respect to these issues. Your model will likely also involve some
relevant census data on population, household, and employment
characteristics. You will create a series of maps that show
state-by-state conditions on each of your individual data attributes;
and maps that show the final state scores on the ‘report
card’ that is generated from your model(s).
Ballard District Council: Urban Development Trends in Ballard
The Ballard District Council has been studying development trends in
their neighborhood, particularly the conversion of single family homes
into higher density land uses. The goal of this project is to create a
spatial database from their existing record of new construction
projects, gather additional data on prior land uses at these sites, and
then develop maps and analysis that explore and demonstrate changes in
land use, density, housing types, and other characteristics of urban
development.
NW Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project: Developing a
historical webGIS
In 2003-2004, Profs. Michael Brown (UW) and Larry Knopp (Univ of
Minnesota – Duluth) worked with the Northwest Lesbian and Gay
History Museum Project to develop a historical map of significant sites
in the history of Seattle’s gay and lesbian communities. The map
is used for education, fundraising, and community development. This
project will update existing data, create new spatial data for the map,
and adapt the existing map so that it is viewable online and can
incorporate multimedia data such as digital photos, sketches, web
links, or sound files.
Audubon Washington (project 1): Climate Change &
Washington’s Important Bird Areas
Audubon Washington, the state office of the National Audubon Society,
is one of the leading conservation organizations in Washington State.
The organization’s mission is “to conserve and restore
natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their
habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth’s biological
diversity.” This project will involve analyzing how environmental
changes from climate change may alter key bird habitat areas in the
Pacific Northwest.
Audubon Washington (project 2): Migration Connections &
Washington’s Important Bird Areas
Audubon Washington, the state office of the National Audubon Society,
is one of the leading conservation organizations in Washington State.
The organization’s mission is “to conserve and restore
natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their
habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth’s biological
diversity.” This project will involve using GIS to identify
Important Bird Areas (IBAs) from Central America to the Arctic that are
linked to Washington IBAs as part of migration flyways. Identifying and
mapping IBAs along the migration, wintering, and breeding ranges of
Washington bird species will help Audubon Washington develop a more
complete picture of the state’s role Western Hemispheric bird
conservation.
Lettuce Link (Solid Ground): Mapping and Data for the Community
Fruit Tree Harvest Project
Solid Ground is a social justice, advocacy, and service organization
that operates a wide range of food, housing, transportation, and
seniors programs. The Community Fruit Tree Harvest is one of several
projects that connects low-income families in Seattle with fresh,
nutritious and organic produce, seeds, and gardening information and
builds awareness about food security and sustainable food production.
The Community Fruit Tree Harvest maintains an Excel spreadsheet of
residential and public sector fruit trees in the City of Seattle. It
contains data about the trees (location, type, when ripe, etc.) and the
owners of the trees. From 10 -20 new trees are added to the spreadsheet
each month. The goal of this project is to create a spatial database
from these data that can be used to produce maps of Seattle fruit
tress, and that can be used through Solid Ground’s website.
Working Wheels Program (Solid Ground): Community Outreach and
Service Area Analysis
Solid Ground is a social justice, advocacy, and service organization
that operates a wide range of food, housing, transportation, and
seniors programs. Working Wheels is a Solid Ground program that sells
good quality used cars to low-income workers in King County in order to
help them maintain employment and build their way out of poverty. This
project will involve building a spatial database and carrying out
analysis to identify existing services areas for Working Wheels as well
as under-served areas of need. The project will also develop a
generalized protocol for carrying out other similar service area and
need assessments, to be used by Solid Ground and other Geog 463
partners in the future.
Health Improvement and Promotion Alliance: Analyzing Indicators
of Health Status in Accra, Ghana
This project partners with a non-profit organization dedicated to
community-based research and health improvement in Nima-Maamobi, a
community in Accra, Ghana. HIP has obtained key data for their health
research from a special run of data collected through Ghana’s
national census, but these data arrived with limited spatial
identifiers to enable their integration into a GIS for analysis and
mapping. The goal of this project is to finish efforts to add spatial
identifiers to the special census data, create a comprehensive
geodatabase of HIP’s census data, and then carry out mapping and
analysis to support their research on health and poverty status in
Nima-Maamobi.
Penny Harvest Program (Solid Ground): Building GIS resources to support a children’s philanthropy
program
Solid Ground is a social justice, advocacy, and service organization
that operates a wide range of food, housing, transportation, and
seniors programs. Penny Harvest is a child philanthropy program run by
Solid Ground, in which local students raise money and then donate the
funds to community-based agencies that offer programming/services they
feel strongly about supporting. A first goal in this project is to
create a geodatabase that will allow Penny Harvest staff to better
understand the service area of the program, the demographic and
socio-economic characteristics of schools it serves, and the
distributions of community programs that have been supported through
the program in the past. A second goal for the project is to develop
(and document) a systematic methodology for identifying businesses near
those schools from online public data (rather than from fieldwork).
Penny Harvest staff would like to seek donations from local businesses
to support their program, but do not have enough time to identify local
businesses near each of the 55 schools through fieldwork. If you are
interested in developing a creative exploratory methodology that relies
on web-based resources such as GoogleMaps, this is a great project for
you.
Puget Sound Partnership & UW-Geography: Roadway Runoff into
Puget Sound
This project will help the WA Dept of Ecology and Puget Sound
Partnership develop a GIS-based risk assessment that characterizes and
prioritizes risks to Puget Sound water quality from roadway contaminant
runoff. Your team will formulate a pilot project studying
rainfall-induced contaminant flow from roadways to Puget Sound for a
Water Resource Inventory Area. A major goal of this project is to
develop and demonstrate a reliable method for carrying out such
analyses, one that might be useful for analyzing non-point source
pollution patterns in other places.
Facing the Future: Analyzing Program Areas & Service Needs
Facing the Future is a Seattle-based non profit organization that
provides educational materials and teacher training nationwide,
focusing on environmental issues, population, and sustainability. The
goal of these activities is to develop “…young
people’s capacity and commitment to create thriving, sustainable,
and peaceful local and global communities.”
(http://www.facingthefuture.org) We are interested in project that will
assess the spatial patterns of our outreach efforts across the U.S. and
the users of our materials. We need you to develop a database in which
we can track our outreach locations and users on an ongoing basis, for
future mapping and analysis beyond this project, and are especially
interested in a map that might be useable on the Web.
