Access to jobs, housing, transportation, Earned Income Tax Credit and Supplemental Security Income were the five hard outcomes of the Bay Area Homeless Alliance. One of the projects that helped us achieve these outcomes was the building of an online Information and Referral Database.

In San Mateo County I had the privilege of working with Janet Hofmann, manager of the Community Information Program which was part of the San Mateo County Peninsula Library System.  The CIP database was already online and had been hosted on a server at Stanford University. Janet already had a plan for moving the database to the county systems. 

The San Mateo County database was searchable by name of agency, type of agency and keywords. Janet and the staff of CIP cooperated in applying a new taxonomy system to the CIP database, programming and providing export of data to the Community Technology Alliance.

There were other counties such as San Francisco and Alameda that also had robust databases of human service providers. Some had databases accessible online, but there were other counties that did not have any central database of service providers.

The CTA built a new server environment using Microsoft Back Office.  Ray Allen of CTA helped all nine counties come to consensus on data set, taxonomy, data management standard, and schedules for transmitting data.

The result was for a time, an online, region-wide searchable database. Since 2001, there have been many changes.  Counties have been maintaining their own online databases. Santa Cruz County joined with Santa Clara. Check out a few of the human service provider databases that are now online:

San Mateo County Community Information Program

Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Help SCC.

Alameda County -- Eden I and R

More about the Bay Area Homeless Alliance>>

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