Objective:
The Digital ACS: Amplifying Community Stories is a digital platform designed to create a collaborative, centralized space for the New York City Child Welfare community. It seeks to provide an interactive and accessible hub for families, youth, researchers, and advocacy groups to share experiences, access resources, and document the communities’ effort towards systemic change within the child welfare system (otherwise indicated as family policing or family policing system).
Importance:
The project aims to provide a safe, anonymous and interactive space for families and youth affected by the NYC’s Family Policing system. While numerous advocacy groups, media platforms, and legal organizations highlight issues faced by the community, there is no existing digital space that allows for real-time engagement, community discussion, and historical documentation of lived experiences in New York City.
Audience:
Families and youths affected by the family policing system
Team Structure:
- Project Led/ Stakeholder Liaison
- Web Developer
- Marketing
Implementation:
The platform will focus on the ability to create posts. Participants may share a written post, picture, and/or link. Posts will be encouraged to be tagged within categories (Resources, Media, Story) or audience may create their own. Each post will be geotagged to an approximate location. The secondary portion of the platform will include a searchable archive of initially three-five pieces that highlight the lived experience within Family Policing, these pieces will be categorized into Stories and the team will geo-tag to the best of their ability. The stories posted by the audience will continue to populate the archive. Thirdly, the geo-tagging will be used to populate a map, to visualize the location of the posts/content/archive. The initiative will be rolled out in phases, beginning with platform development, followed by community outreach and engagement.
The platform will be developed in three phases, ensuring a structured and sustainable approach:
- Phase 1: Platform Development
- The platform will be built using WordPress, integrating a blog-based structure with features for user engagement.
- A foundational archive will be created with three-five key pieces documenting lived experience
- A tagging system will be implemented to categorize content into three primary groups: Resources, Media, and Stories.
- Users will be able to post content, comment, and engage with the material interactively
- A geo-tagging feature will allow users to tag their submissions, and also tag the initial archive with location data to populate an interactive heat map created by QGIS that visually represents content distribution and thematic trends across NYC
- Phase 2: Community Engagement & Marketing
- Connect with Graham Windham (Child Welfare Provider Agency) to recommend our platform to their clients
- Connect with RISE Magazine, an online platform that shares impacted parents stories and raises awareness about family policing history and policies.
- Look for partnerships within in CUNY especially Hunter Silberman School of Social Work
- Create a social media page, either Facebook or Instagram to promote the platform
- Phase 3: Launch, Continued Marketing, Future Planning
- Platform will be monitored after launch to ensure high user experience, marketing will continue to encourage content creation
- The platform will integrate with social media via hashtag-based content aggregation (#digitalACS) to amplify voices beyond the website
- A long-term content management strategy will be implemented to ensure sustained engagement, including periodic content reviews, user-driven content additions, and continued advocacy collaboration
Challenges:
- Minimal skills in QGIS
- Lack skills in Web development
- Audience is very diverse, culturally and linguistically
The Digital ACS project sounds like an important addition to resources for families who are involved with NYC’s Child Services system. The blog-based platform would connect families in a more personal space than what seems to be available currently. I like how you would align the project with schools of social work and especially with the RISE group. I am wondering how you would address privacy/identity security, as some posters might wish to ensure their anonymity for a variety of reasons.
I look forward to your project pitch!
Hi Carla! This project is excellent. I have two questions for you, both regarding the platforms. This project seems to be built to exist for a long time outside of our time at CUNY, so will the WordPress site start from another account or will the goal be to migrate it later? Also, in terms of social media integration, how do you intend for that to manifest in terms of amplifying voices?
Great work, and I look forward to hearing more tomorrow!
Hi Cathy and Leonard!
Thank you for your comments. I forgot to add in my challenges section the security and anonymity of users, this would be critical to the user and platform as participants share sensitive family information. I envision the posts to be anonymous by default, and if a user would like to add their name, they have the option. I need a better understanding on how to protect users who do use their name and how to protect their ownership of the posts in the archive.
I would love for the project to live beyond my time at CUNY, that is another challenge I face as my knowledge around the capabilities of wordpress are minimal. I would like to connect with our DH fellows to find a platform that is easy to manage long term.
Thank you again for your questions!
Hi Carla! I think this project is a great idea. As I was reading this thinking about the security/anonymity concerns. There is an app called Lex (it’s a digital space for the queer community that is formatted to be digital personals ads) where folks can make posts under a username/profile they create through the app, other users can comment and/or react, and there is DM function for folks to talk privately. I wonder if you could make something like a digital community cork board or something where the community could connect both publicly and privately.