St. Joseph Center (SJC) is a Homeless Service Provider in Los Angeles. SJC provides a variety of services to 10,000 – 14,000 homeless and low-income clients per year. These services include employment development, street outreach, housing, mental health, and food services. Looking at four years’ worth of data, SJC wants to better understand service trends, program intersectionality, and seasonal trends to better integrate our programs and serve our clients. Additionally, we want to explore the length of time it is taking to house our clients and the impact of race on those housing outcomes.
Due to funder requirements, all the services and work with clients is recorded across 5 different databases. Once a year, a master list of services and clients is created to complete a year-end report. SJC is looking for a team to do a deeper dive into 4 years of client data to answer the following question:
•How long, on average, are clients spending in each type of program before being housed?
•How is race impacting program use, housing, and retention of our clients across programs? And how do those findings compare to the larger homelessness and housing landscape in the areas of Los Angeles where we work?
•Does the data reflect any trends in service utilization? If so, are there any predictive or seasonal trends that we should anticipate and/or respond to with changes in programming?
•Where are the strongest linkages or intersections between our programs? And are there program linkages that correlate positively or negatively to housing outcomes?
Using Tableau and other computing software as needed, we would like students to create a Dashboard that answers these questions and provides statistical analysis where possible. When looking at housing, developing an interactive map that tracks where our clients are being housed and how race affects their housing location and retention would be useful. We would want a dashboard created where we can plug in future years data sets to have a tool for ongoing analysis.
