Our Partners
With the Florida Community Resource Map, we’ve partnered with the United Way of NW FL and the Central Florida Foundation.
On our public education campaigns, we’ve partnered with the Science Cheerleaders and the UF-VA Bioethics Unit.
For our research projects, we’ve worked with the University of Michigan’s School of Information, the University of Florida’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service, and American University’s School of Public Affairs.
With the City of Miami, Parks & Recreation Department, FCI is building a historical education app that introduces Floridians to the historic City Cemetary.
Florida Resource Map
One of FCI’s current projects is the Florida Community Resource Map. The Map is an interactive, public-facing portal through which Floridians can quickly and conveniently locate key resources available to them, including but not limited to: healthcare, food and nutrition, and COVID-19 testing. Through a partnership with the United Way of Northwest FL and the Central Florida Foundation, we were able to gain access to survey data on hundreds of community resources to input into our tool.
Release 1 of the resource map went live in the spring of 2020 with a focus on creating a simple user experience to get people to what they needed in the fastest way possible. The Map is hosted in its own webapp, but also has a home on the United Way of Northwest FL’s webpage and the Central Florida Foundation’s nonprofit search page. FCI also conducted outreach campaigns through social media and local news outlets/newspapers to get the word out about the map to help people find the resources they needed.
In February 2021, FCI went live with release 2 of the Map. We focused on improving the user experience and user interface, building a more robust backend to support more and more locations, and building a user feedback form to continue to collect information on how to make the map better for all Floridians. We are currently working on the next iteration of the Map.
Florida Alliance for Response to Epidemics (FARE)
One of FCI’s first projects was the Florida Alliance for Response to Epidemics (FARE).
Beginning in March 2020, FARE, with input from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from the fields of public health communication and medicine, developed a behavior change messaging campaign in the public interest. The goal was to encourage Floridians to social distance, and message designs were developed from contemporary themes using an adapted grounded research methodology.
By the numbers, in 2020…
185,824 Unique Floridians were reached with FARE social media ads
411,829 Impressions generated by FARE content
11% Of total population in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, Tampa, and West Palm Beach areas were reached with FARE ads
$457.38 Total ad spend across all FARE campaigns
FARE partners included the UF-VA Bioethics Unit, the Science Cheerleaders, the Central Florida Foundation, and the United Way of Northwest Florida.
Public interest outreach examples:
For the entire archive of FARE activities and for periodic public health content, see FARE social media:
Collaboration with the University of Florida’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service
FCI partnered with the Bob Graham Center to pay student researchers and run a class in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022. Read more about our students on the Student Spotlight page.
Michigan’s School of Information
Through the University of Michigan’s School of Information, in Fall 2021, FCI partnered with undergraduate researchers from the University Reach Consulting Group. These students worked with FCI to investigate the distribution and accessibility of resources throughout the Central Florida area. Through a survey drafted and dispersed by FCI, Reach compared the concentration of active resource providers across over fifteen counties in Central Florida. It was found that education and disability resources were especially sparse across almost all counties, with the exception of Orange County. From there Reach concluded that proportional funding for such resources based on population size should be implemented. Explore their results online.
In Spring 2022, FCI partnered with graduate student researchers from the University of Michigan’s School of Information to improve the user experience (UX) of the Florida Community Resource Map and to study the needs of social workers in relation to the digital access of resources on behalf of their clients. Explore their results online.
Collaboration with American University’s School of Public Affairs
In Spring 2022, FCI parntered with graduate student researchers in American University’s School of Public Affairs Department of Public Administration and Policy to conduct policy research about local governments and service provision in the State of Florida, with an eye toward improving the Florida Community Resource Map. Explore their work online.