Life is a highway

I'll take a brief break to tell you a little about my latest project. My materials: maps and stickers. Lots of them.

As you know, I compiled a database of over 320 organizations and agencies throughout our 7-county region that are not currently OBB sites but that, we believe, could make potentially good sites. While part of my assignment is to increase the number of OBB sites in each county, I hope to employ some strategy in my site recruitment.

Most of our current, active sites, are located in urban areas of each county, with many of them only a few blocks from each other. This over-saturation of urban OBB sites tends to be particularly prevalent in Northeast Ohio. Here in Southwest Ohio, we have also found that with so few local, rural OBB sites, many rural families and individuals are not being served.

Last week at community training orientation, Sam Flores, a VISTA from the Second Harvest Foodbank of North Central Ohio, told me about a project that she has been working on to address over-saturation issues that involves mapping all OBB sites. She tipped me off to obtain maps from county engineers and to create Google maps to get a better idea of where our current sites are located and where we really need more sites. I ordered [free] maps from each of the seven counties in my region and over the past two days, I have been working on plotting each of the current sites on the appropriate county map, as well as creating a Google map of each county's sites.

Here's how I'm doing it:
I type in the address of the site from our spreadsheet into Google maps. I save the spot on the map, then find it on my paper map, where I place the appropriate sticker to represent which type of site it is.

A green star sticker denotes an active OBB site, while a green star with a black dot denotes an active site that is open to the public. (One concern among Regional Coordinators and VISTAs around the state is that too many sites serve only their own clients and are not open to the general public. While the number of OBB sites may be high in an area, that number can be deceiving if the general public can not access any of those sites. It's good to have an accurate depiction of the sites' policy.)

So far I have only plotted 48 current, active sites (green star, green star/black dot) for Butler, Warren, and Montgomery counties. I'll continue working on plotting the remaining counties' current sites, before moving on to the potential sites in the database. I imagine a gold star will denote a potential OBB site that is currently partnered with Shared Harvest, and a blue star will denote a potential OBB site that is not currently affiliated with the foodbank. I might also use red or silver stars to show where we can access computer labs for trainings or meeting rooms for presentations.

So thanks, Sam, for the great idea--not only are we able to get a better picture of the sites in each county, but I am learning a lot more about the region without having to leave the office!