Sponsor
Sharon Stewart,
Director of Community Outreach,
USC Community House
2801 South Hoover Street
Los Angeles, CA 90089-7740
Telephone: (213) 743-5264
FAX: (213) 743-4511
sstewart@usc.edu.

Description
Who: USC Civic and Community Relations (CCR) harnesses the resources of the university and links them to those of the community to create and support a variety of projects and programs. In that role, CCR collaborates closely with community leaders; community-based organizations; and USC faculty, staff and students. Under the umbrella of the USC Family of Schools, CCR works closely with USC Neighborhood Outreach (UNO) funded programs ; such public and private entities bring a variety of educationally-enriching programs to K-12 pupils at 12 area schools.

Why: Each UNO-funded organization currently operates like a small business, deciding when and how to invest in tools to improve the program’s quality. Some programs have enough resources to see some improvement, while other programs are too small. Even the larger programs cannot invest in tools that will make a substantial difference, and it is recommended that CCR develop a centrally deployed solution on behalf of the 28 currently funded UNO organizations. Additional benefits of a centrally deployed tech-oriented solution include a consistent data schema (i.e. fields and relationships consistently named), substantially reduced costs, information sharing across organizations and the ability for multi-group communication. In addition, CCR wishes to document and evaluate the reach and efficacy of the UNO program.

What: The proposed technology project would deliver a new web-based solution that will support all of the UNO-funded organizations, and improve communication with the coordinators, principals, teachers, children and parents. The goal of the proposed system is to provide individual programs with the information technology tools and program data they need to improve their programs. Also, the internal tools will be integrated with some publicly facing web-based tools, to give parents better access to information and increase the accuracy of online data (since most of the internal tools would automatically update the public web-pages). Specifically, CCR wishes to address the following:

Scheduling challenges; need for online access to accurate schedules; Need for collaborative scheduling tools; accountability, quantification; marketing challenges; and searchable databases across programs. Additionally, CCR is interested in creating a central data schema that allows for tracking, improved accountability, easier report submission and quantification of results.