Almost Non-funded GIS in the American Outback for a Non-Profit
Rural Resources Community Action is a regional private non-profit agency founded to combat poverty and its effects in Northeast Washington and headquartered in Colville, Washington. The agency undertakes a multitude of programs, from weatherization to senior nutrition to energy assistance, job search, and Head Start classes to transportation services in a three-county area without any kind of public transit area.
I came aboard several years ago to run the Carpool Match Program in Ferry, Stevens, and Pend Orielle Counties. Most of my time since then, however, has been helping the department get off paper by working with a vendor to develop a custom dispatch/transportation reporting application, developing an Access-based vehicle maintenance app taylored to our needs, writing a couple of major reports used by several agencies around the area and pulling the agency itself into the 21st century by leading a team to roll out an organizational intranet and source/customize/develop/and input a centralized program for managing client data.
When I got here, the Transportation Director (Kelly Scalf) had already purchased several ESRI ArcGIS desktop licenses (all ArcView) after seeing what the data side of the program was capable of generating--figuring the department would somehow use it to develop automated means of tracking riders and fiding routing solutions. There was no one in the department, however, with the wherewithal to learn ArcGIS. So there had been a bit of work done on it by a local contractor, but it wasn't very useful.
After expressing an interest in learning more about ArcGIS, the boss sent me to school for the intro courses in ESRI desktop. What I learned there helped me get started in using the product to develop maps for a Tri-County Transportation Survey Report that blew readers away with how survey results could be quantified on maps.
Looking back on that now, all of three years ago or so, it's really very rough and not very useful. Since then, I've been pecking away at my abysmal ignorance of GIS mapping and trying to develop local resources for things like truly useful address locators for my area--with some limited success. The mapping I produce now is used by the organization as a whole on occasion. For instance, when representatives of a geographic subset of our operational area complained they were getting no services, I was able to geo-locate most of the clients in that area that had received services and show them on a map in a way that left no doubt that we were, indeed, very active in that area. I also built a better set of maps to illustrate many of the points of a regional coordinated human services transportation plan that WSDOT reps wanted to use as an example of how to produce these kinds of plans.
Now I spend some time, all I can, in developing better core data and better gis skills. So I try to get to some of the conferences and take the occasional class to keep my hand in the game.
But I can spend maybe 5% of my time working with ArcGIS. Every time I go back to do something, I have to relearn half of what I already knew.
Maybe there's others with the same issue out there and we can form a crying-towel club?
