Visualizations
Conclusion
Resource Recommendations
The education resource category has below an average of 50% serviceable rate per week. There are also numerous counties in the category that show little to no resources available. Education also has the potential to impact many of the other categories mentioned, such as housing, health insurance, and basic needs. RCG believes that an increase in education for the general population also has the ability to help with the homeless crisis, as well as provide income for basic needs. Reach’s recommendation is that all counties without any educational services currently should gain funding. While Orange county already has a roughly 20% service rate, due to the high population, the true number of people who are in need in the education category remains higher than those counties without any services currently. Therefore, we believe a proportional amount of funding based on county population could be implemented.
The disability resource category also has below an average of 40% serviceable rate per week. In addition, there are 9 counties that show no resources available. Disability is a category isolated from many other categories because a person’s disability status is often out of their control and cannot be impacted by having other resources more readily available (i.e. education, health insurance etc.). RCG believes that an increase in access to disability services would provide an increase in the basic needs category as well. Our recommendation is that counties without disability services should gain funding. RCG also recommends that disability resources receive attention and funding across the board because the number of people with disability greatly outnumbers the number of people serviceable per week.
County Recommendations
Orange and Seminole counties, while they do have resources available, have much larger populations and need much more attention than the smaller counties. The number of people in need in Orange and Seminole counties greatly outnumbers the number of people serviceable.
Hillsborough and Pinellas counties have the highest rate of need based on our assumptions with the lowest rate of resources currently provided. In all categories, these two counties had the highest ratio of need to resources provided. This is likely due to the larger metropolitan area of Tampa, FL. While Reach assumes that there are necessary resources in these areas, similarly to the ratios found in Orange and Seminole counties, the data provided indicated a lack of resources in this area.
Recommendations for Future Analysis
The original data that Reach Consulting Group received from the Florida Community Innovation Foundation included many free response variables. Typically, data that includes free response variables and numerical ranges are more difficult to analyze without the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In the future, Reach Consulting Group recommends including less free response questions, and more multiple choice and drop down menu questions which will therefore increase the consistency of the data gathered. Following best data practices, we also recommend allowing the average number serviceable per week to be a short response where organizations can enter a singular value. Reach is more than willing to briefly look at future Google Forms and provide quick feedback on potential questions from a data analysis viewpoint.
RCG also recommends promoting and sharing their Google Form across all of the counties to better represent the different resources available across Central Florida. For instance, Hillsborough county contains Tampa FL which has a large population of 387,916, but our analysis shows Hillsborough has very few resources. RCG has made the assumption that this is because the Google Form has not been sent out to many services in the western parts of Central Florida.