10 – Reducing Inequality – Worcester Community Project Center

March 7, 2025March 7, 2025 by Laura Roberts

Habitat for Humanity Restore: Developing and Implementing a Translation Tool for use in Habitat for Humanity ReStore Locations

Project Description Language barriers in Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore second-hand stores prevent communication between employees, volunteers, and non-English speaking customers. Through research and piloting in the Worcester and Ashland ReStores, we established that Spanish, Portuguese, and Persian are key languages and built a web-based translation solution with Microsoft Translator, OpenAI’s Whisper, and GPT-4o-mini. The solution…

July 7, 2024July 10, 2024 by mjbrown2

Legendary Legacies: Recommendations for Formatting a Gang Outreach Curriculum

Project Description The organization we worked with has taken its years of experience working with returning citizens and at-risk individuals and developed a seven-module educational gang outreach worker curriculum that it will launch hopefully in 2024. The program will share what Legendary Legacies has learned about effective outreach work, relationship building, cognitive behavior therapy, crisis…

January 24, 2024August 7, 2024 by prhussey

WPI: Get out the Goat Vote

Project Description In the 2020 presidential election, voter turnout among those ages 18-24 was 51%, which pales in comparison to the 67% turnout for overall voters. It is critically important that the youth vote as they have the most to gain from the actions of those elected. It’s also been observed by many people that…

January 11, 2024June 6, 2024 by earothschild

Addressing Period Poverty and Enhancing Student Life

Abstract Period poverty, the lack of access to menstrual products and hygienic facilities to use them, impacts 16.9 million menstruators in the United States and often forces people to choose between menstrual products and food (Michel et al., 2022). For our project, we developed recommendations to assist State Senator Robyn Kennedy in addressing the impacts…

May 18, 2023August 28, 2023 by mklarrabee

Habitat for Humanity: Developing a New and Sustainable Weight Estimation Method for Habitat for Humanity (MetroWest/Greater Worcester) and Beyond

Project Overview (Abstract) Habitat for Humanity Metro-West/Greater Worcester needed a new method to estimate landfill diversion from their ReStore sales. Finding diversion numbers is important as this aids the organization in applying for grants to support the nonprofit financially. We developed a methodology for finding the average weight of inventory being purchased by customers. We…

April 27, 2023May 2, 2023 by lmmorris

El Buen Samaritano: Implementing Data Collection Software at El Buen Samaritano

Project Description For over 30 years, the El Buen Samaritano Food Program (EBS) has served the Worcester community by providing food and clothing to those in need. Since its founding, the organization has used a pen and paper system to track the resources they provide and collect demographic information on their clients which is needed…

March 21, 2023May 6, 2023 by jwewen

MassEdCO: Creating an Interactive Resource for Teaching Financial Literacy

Project Description Too many students graduate college with thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of student debt. MassEdCO and our team found that there is a lack of education around financial literacy which leads to students making poor choices out of high school putting them in so much debt. Therefore, we developed a new resource…

November 1, 2022December 17, 2022 by ceouellette

Legendary Legacies: Tracking the Reentry Phase for Post-Incarcerated Individuals

Project Description Reentry in the U.S. is a complicated and multifaceted issue with many challenges facing justice-involved individuals. In collaboration with Legendary Legacies, our team developed a new approach to evaluating data in the reentry space. While historically, data collected regarding program participants have been primarily quantitative, the secret to fostering positive change may lay…

March 17, 2022May 11, 2022 by Laura Roberts

Transitioning El Buen Samaritano to a Digital Data Collection Platform

Project Description Through our project, we aimed to facilitate and simplify the food distribution and data management process for the local food pantry, El Buen Samaritano. By implementing a technological solution, we hoped to improve the inventory system that the organization is currently using. Shifting from the current pen-and-paper system to a digital system, the…

January 19, 2022May 11, 2022 by Laura Roberts

Welcome NST: Integrating Technology

Project Description WelcomeNST is a refugee resettlement organization using a private co-sponsorship model. Our project used technology to improve communication and information storage at WelcomeNST. We conducted interviews with Slack experts and NST members and observed WelcomeNST’s Slack workspace. We found communication disconnects, decentralized knowledge and resources, and technology limitations. We investigated potential Slack add…