❮ Projects page Britepaths

Spatial Analysis Project:

Fairfax County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country, with a very high cost of living and significant pockets of poverty scattered throughout. Britepaths provides financial coaching, financial mentoring, financial literacy classes and workforce development opportunities to low and middle-income families in Fairfax County, Virginia. As a non-profit trying to help people in financial crisis, we consider our competitors to be pay day loan companies who take advantage of these families. We are looking to improve our targeted marketing (both conventional and digital) and identify possible locations for satellite offices within the County. We are looking for a map of Fairfax County at a neighborhood level, that would layer poverty, education, employment and language, with overlays of pay day loan companies, County operated social service centers, and public transportation.

Data available:

We can work with you to give you any data from our own clients that we collect without identifiers. We have a list of County service centers and payday loan places in Fairfax County, as well as Title Max and other similar establishments. All is available from public databases.

Fairfax County and other regional organizations have a significant number of demographic resources that we use, but we cannot figure out how to layer them or how to get to neighborhood level.

Maps and Reports that will be created:

We need a map of Fairfax County, Virginia that includes the independent cities of Fairfax and Falls Church which geographically fall within the County. We want to see the County at a neighborhood or census tract level, that would layer

  • Residents that live at 200% of federal poverty level or below
  • Adult residents (25 years and older) who have less than a high school education
  • Adult residents who are unemployed or not in work force
  • Predominate languages spoken

We would like to have an overlay that shows physical locations for pay day loan companies and similar establishments, County operated social service centers, and public transportation.

If this is too much, we can start with neighborhoods that have a high rate of poverty and only work the details for them, or divide the map into multiple maps.

How the maps and reports will be used:

Britepaths will initially use the maps for three purposes:

1) Target our marketing for Britepaths free financial services to the same customers that frequent pay day loan companies, to help keep them from incurring unnecessary debt and financial problems.

2) In conjunction with the United Way of the National Capital Area and Fairfax County Neighborhood and Community Services, we have applied for grant funding to help us expand our Financial Empowerment Center to smaller satellite offices. We would like to use the maps to determine which areas would benefit the most from these services and which languages would we need to offer our services in.

3) Target marketing for the Britepaths Healthcare Pre-Apprenticeship program which teaches contextualized remedial education to unemployed or underemployed residents who want to work in the healthcare field. We are planning to expand to the Construction and IT fields in the near future.

Organization https://britepaths.org
Shortlist year 2019
Category Community & Economic Development
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