The Digital ACS: Amplifying Community Strength
This online platform is intended for Children, Youth & Families impacted by the NYC Child Welfare system looking to connect with other community members, share their experiences, and browse for local resources, groups, and archival related media.
The goal of the platform is to create a digital communal space for Children Youth & Families that will
- A blogging site (would that be the best word?)
- An Archive of the published content and past content on other platforms
- A heat map to visualize the conversations as they come in and locate the already present online media
The “blogging” platform would include:
- Have the ability to post and comment/ react, like a blog, from people within the community
- Include a tagging feature for content. The tags will serve as a tool for browsing through conversations and categorizing content.
- Reactionary button to capture the audience approval/disapproval (thinking of something like verifying the content in a sense)
- Centralize and categorize stories published in major online media outlets from the past year in an easy-to-browse archive
The first phase of the project will focus on creating the blogging tool. The objectives of this phase are:
- Create a code of conduct: Build trust with our audience by communicating data transparency
- Establish clear web design, accessibility, and navigation
- Develop and Test the platform
- Create partnerships with stakeholders to promote platform
Importance:
There are many stories of families and their experiences within Child Welfare, however these stories are scattered all across the web. In the first phase the platform would provide a digital space for the community to share insights, resources, and stories. In additional phases the project would create a bridge between current families and past families of the system, by establishing an archive of past media and news articles, and lastly it will work towards visualizing the many stories, resources, and media of the New York City families impacted by Child Welfare, past & present, on a heat map.
The tools & resources that will be used are:
WordPress: Digital Platform
Plug in: DH Press
Canva: for preliminary web design
