Project Sponsor: Worcester Community Connections Coalition
The Worcester Community Connections Coalition (WCCC) is a coalition of Worcester parents who come together to help families deal with child maltreatment, neglect, and abuse. They work together to distribute the Blue Book to families and parents who are struggling and in need to support families and help children, within these families, succeed. Youth Opportunities Upheld, Inc. (Y.O.U. Inc.) is a private, non-profit child welfare and behavioral health organization that the WCCC works as a part of. Y.O.U Inc. is also a part of the Seven Hills Foundation & Affiliates organization.
The website can be found here.
Student Researchers
Our IQP team is comprised of Eli Breitbart Frischling, Brendan Olexa, Bridgette Paredes, Alex Poll, and Julia Meisser.
Project Goal and Objectives
The main goal for this project was to create a digital platform for the WCCC to provide their “Blue Book,” allowing it to be more widely available and easily and frequently updated. We created five step-by-step objectives to achieve this goal by the end of our 8-week IQP project timeline:
- Gain an understanding of what the Worcester community needs in a digital resource guide through research and interviews.
- Gain an understanding of the WCCC and what it needs from a digital platform and the options it had available, and the limitations of those options.
- Gain an understanding of other organizations and individuals who have developed similar digital resource guides and learn about the processes they followed.
- Develop a digital platform that contains all of the necessary resources of the guide that is also easy to use and accessible to those in lower income families.
- Develop a guide for the WCCC that instructs them on how to update the digital resource guide.