Abstract

GIS Approaches for Improving the Efficacy Social Service Delivery
Track: Health and Human Services
Authors: Daniel Goldberg, Loc Nguyen

Current strategies to place children in foster homes often utilize a single geographic parameter - placement with the child's home school district. This approach ignores other critical geographic factors that may contribute to the safety, well-being, and permanence of the child as well influence ultimate reunification with a parent or guardian. This presentation will discuss an alternative approach to identifying potential placements of children that is based on a multi-criteria geographic analysis facilitated by the ArcGIS Model Builder framework. The process for defining, ranking, scoring, and combining the set of expert-user obtained geographic criteria will be discussed as will be preliminary experimental results and challenges for deploying the system at broader scales.