Visualizing Vital Resources to Support Resettled Refugees
Tags: Data Visualization, Refugees, Nonprofit, GIS, UN

Visualizing Vital Resources to Support Resettled Refugees

Graphicacy, in partnership with Mapbox, joins with USA for UNHCR for the 2020 Opportunity Project to connect resettled refugees with resources around the United States using government data on refugee arrivals and charitable organizations. Graphicacy Follow Dec 3, 2020 · 4 min read

A view of the last decade of resettlements across the United States

The Opportunity Project

As part of the Lifting Up Families for Economic Success Session of The Opportunity Project, hosted by the United States Census Bureau’s Census Open Innovation Lab, Graphicacy partnered with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Mapbox to build the Resettled Refugee Services and Data Explorer.

This project was an opportunity for the Graphicacy team to dedicate pro-bono resources in keeping with our company’s mission to Visualize a Better World. The team was led by Graphicacy’s Director of Engineering and Innovation Chris Lanoue and engineering intern Allie Littleton. The team participated in the intersection of open data, public interest technology, and public/private sector collaboration — including USDA, HUD, EPA, the State Department, the Wilson Center, USA for UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) — to develop over 35+ data-driven solutions in response to challenges like ocean plastic pollution, sustainable rural development and support of resettled refugees.

Our specific challenge was to create a tool that connects resettled refugees with resources and vital services, such as access to medical care and mental health treatment, English language learning, job training, and education. As part of this challenge, we used our expertise in data visualization, UX, and mapping to design and engineer an interactive experience that connects resettled refugees with resources around the United States using both the WRAPSNET and Charity Navigator open-data sources.

User Journeys

We focused on two user journeys for this experience. Our first user is a refugee who recently resettled to the US and is looking for the best place to find resources and vital services within a short distance from their current location. Using Mapbox’s extensive developer tools and a good user experience, we built a way for our first user to search for their city and state and immediately see resources (with links, where available) from Charity Navigator within a 50-mile radius of their location. The goal is to ease the burden of resettlement and put refugees on a path to self-sufficiency.

Our second user is a resettled refugee who is interested in learning where other refugees, especially from their home country, have been placed over the last decade throughout the US. The combination of the intuitive interactive map with a robust filtering tool allows our user to not only find where other refugees resettled, but also to see locations where refugees from their country may be located.

Future

During the development and presentation of this application, we interviewed a few resettled refugees to help ensure we were optimizing their user experience. In addition to the interviews, we also pored over beta user heatmaps from Hotjar and analytics from Google Analytics to help inform our future roadmap. Based on the feedback and research, we prioritized a few additional features including:

Allowing users to filter not only by country of origin, but also primary language of country of origin.

Adding iconography and tags to better present the charitable resources data for non-English speakers and for faster identification of the vital resources a user may be in search of.

As a pro-bono project for The Opportunity Project, we wanted the application to live in perpetuity and are therefore in the process of open sourcing the code base for the project, so that other interested engineers and software professionals can contribute and help the project grow and become an even better resource for resettled refugees in the United States for years to come.