When I taught at a local community college in Johnson County, Iowa, most of our English language learners were immigrants and refugees from the Western Asia and Africa. Many of them were struggling to find assistance with basic needs. I knew that there were quite a few nonprofits and other programs that were available to help people in need, but due to one reason or another there wasn’t a single place where their information could be available. To address this need, I started compiling this directory of resources for new Iowans in Johnson county. It started with free English classes and conversation groups for English learners that were available in the area, but quickly grew to address other needs as well.
It took a combination of researching these resources online, emailing and calling their contact information to confirm details, and talking with colleagues to get the information together.
I did learn that these networks of non-profit projects tend to be very informal and change a lot. If I could do this over again, I would probably structure it so that the data is posted in some easy to read and work with format like YAML, and I write the styling and scripts to generate a nice looking functional directory of resources. I could then host it on GitHub and more easily invite other educators and social workers in the community to edit the data as they learn of any changes.
This was definitely a labor of love, and I wanted to do something to help people get settled and feel welcome in the community. The information is probably well out of date by now. If I ever move to a place with similar needs, I’d be happy to develop a new one.
Update
For a while, the document was hosted as a (now lost) Google Doc. This version went out to my faculty colleagues and a few social workers that I had contact with around February 2017. Currently, it is hosted as a small web app on GitHub. People are welcome to contribute pull requests to update information in the directory.