The Power of You
How One Person Can Mobilize A Community With Open Source Databases & SMS Messaging
Did you know that all it takes is one person to organize and mobilize whole groups of people? By personalizing online, open source databases, you can equip your community to better tackle issues and problems - whether you're mobilizing volunteers to help with a disaster or friends to join you on a neighborhood clean-up. Join this workshop to learn database development skills and best practices of community engagement. Through interactive learning and modeling of open-source databases, you'll gain hands-on experience in addressing social issues through effective, scalable communication tools, like SMS messaging. You'll also gain a personalized framework of how to collaborate, track, and adjust your action strategy over time.
About Jennifer Hardin:
Ms. Hardin's work has focused on vulnerable populations including at-risk youth to transitioning refugees. After graduating from Tulane's Disaster Resilience Leadership program she gained much of her program management and emergency planning and response experience working on humanitarian crisis and stability initiatives responding to ongoing civil unrest, extremist violence, and conflict in the Middle East; specifically Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria. She is currently the Executive Director for evacuteer.org and non-profit organization contracted by the City of New Orleans to assist 30,000 residents to evacuate during a mandatory evacuation.
About Evacuteer.org:
Evacuteer.org recruits, trains, and manages evacuation volunteers (evacuteers) who assist with New Orleans’ public evacuation option called City Assisted Evacuation Plan (CAE). CAE activates when a mandatory evacuation is called in the city of New Orleans and is designed to move 25,000-30,000 New Orleanians without transportation. The City has successfully implemented the plan once, in advance of Hurricane Gustav (Sept. 2008), when 18,000 residents utilized the CAE.  Evacuteer.org is an organization created out of lessons learned from that experience. Through an existing agreement with the City of New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (NOHSEP), the City of New Orleans has authorized evacuteer.org to manage all volunteers who work within the CAEP at 17 neighborhood pick-up points, at the Union Passenger Terminal (hereafter UPT) for evacuee processing, and at City Hall to assist with 311 hotline operation.
The organization has been featured on CNN, National Public Radio, the Huffington Post, the Times-Picayune, The New York Times, The LA Times, the Associated Press, ABC 26, Fox 8, WDSU and the Gambit for its community and citizen engagement strategies and preparing New Orleanians for future storms. The organization trains 500 citizens each hurricane season to assist in the event of an evacuation.