Our goal is to make social services more accessible and understandable to everyone through and online, easy to use medium. By eliminating discrimination as it relates to language barriers and socioeconomic status, our website is reachable and compatible for anyone seeking assistance with applying for or obtaining social services. In our pitch, we highlighted some features of our website such as help with the process of applying for food assistance, namely the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, child care assistance, adult and child protective services, and general relief benefits. Our website, Mysocialservicesonline.com, or MySSO, will begin by providing assistance to residents of the state of Virginia. Located on the site will not only be contact and location information for all of the offices in Virginia offering social services, but will feature a Google Maps add-in that will allow individuals to enter their home address and find the social services office nearest to them. Additionally, the site will feature drop-down lists of a variety of social services offered in Virginia. These links will lead to a specific page for a specific social service, featuring a step-by-step “how-to” guide that details everything one needs to obtain the specific social service, and links to helpful resources such as applications or additional government office contact information, such as the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. One of the most important features of our site, however, is the ability of our site to be converted into multiple languages for those whose primary language is not English. Our goal is to be able to have our site translated into Spanish, French, and German, along with English.
Our team received $490.00 in funding for a Wix premium membership to create our website, ownership of our domain name, and advertising. The biggest feedback we received from the judges was that we should conduct a comprehensive survey of the resources that already exist, such as United Way, to see if there is already someone or something doing what we plan to do, and further refine our ideas.
Since the pitch, we have done just this, and determined that what makes our site unique is the hands-on access to all of the information one needs to start applying for social services, whereas programs like United Way and 411 only offer services over the phone. Currently, our team is working on the step-by-step “how-to” guides for each social service webpage. These are turning out to take some time, and after they are completed, we hope to begin finding help to translate them. We have yet to use any funding, since we determined that it would be best to have most of our material for the website already completed and uploaded before we purchase any site membership or advertising space.
The biggest obstacle we are facing is time and time management. The team was not able to meet frequently during finals, and the start of the second semester is proving to be extremely busy. The “how-to” guides are proving more difficult to complete than we anticipated due to the sheer amount of information that must be included on them to achieve our goal. The next major challenge will be finding help to translate such guides and pages for individuals whose first language may not be English. We hope to make some major headway on these projects soon, so that we do not fall too far behind.