After the year we’ve all had, we think it’s important to acknowledge the pain, pressure and loss felt by our communities — and to also make time for a brief pause to celebrate all those who spent this year in service of their communities, doing hard and intensely important work to meet those critical needs. At USDR — born out of a pandemic but built for beyond — we are in awe of the work our volunteers, team, ecosystem, and partners have come together to do since March 2020, fixing and building systems that help millions in real time, all during a time of extreme uncertainty and need.
On April 22, 2021, USDR (virtually) brought together partners from across the country to reflect on all the ways that governments and community-based organizations had to stretch their efforts, flex their skills, and rise to unprecedented challenges over the past year.
The stretch-clap was born uniquely out of the start of a pandemic when USDR was created as an entirely remote organization. Every other week we hosted a virtual Show and Tell and realized that, on shared, muted Zoom screens, we needed a way to applaud one another without actually being able to hear each other. We came up with the stretch-clap — a side-to-side, overhead arm movement that is our way of showing enthusiasm and appreciation for someone else in the room while we’re distributed in different places.
The inaugural USDR Stretch-Clap Awards were our way of saying thank you to the people, teams, organizations and governments who have been at the forefront of crisis response, ensuring that crucial civil support systems, and even the most basic and fundamental functions of our democratic process, deliver for those who need them most. As part of the event, we highlighted some projects that emerged as touchstones along the way. They serve as models to be replicated and scaled up, teamwork to be inspired by, and demonstrations of what digital ways of working in government can do to serve people efficiently, effectively and equitably.
Shared below are the five awards recognizing nine of our incredible partners. Following their presentation, USDR announced the titular Stretch-Clap Award, which went to all 200+ of our partners across 36 states and territories for their incredible work. Together, we met the needs of 40 million people with the speed demanded by a once-in-a-century crisis.
Thank you to our volunteers and partners for their incredible work over the past year. We are thankful for the opportunity to have mobilized with them to provide support on everything from COVID-19 testing to vaccination rollout, elections and voting access, housing, food security, unemployment insurance and so much more.
Read on to learn more about the Stretch-Clap Awards and the honorees.
The Seed Award, for the project that built something that grew to help others:
HARRIS COUNTY, TEXAS
Harris County, Texas, the third-largest county in the U.S. with more than 4.7 million voters, was working hard during the summer of 2020 to prepare for the November election. The Elections Administrator team was in particular need of help managing its Student Election Clerk Program, which encourages high school students who are 16 years of age or older to serve as election clerks. In the context of COVID-19, with safety concerns and an increased need for student election clerks due to additional early voting days, the program’s completely manual system was at its breaking point.
Harris County partnered with USDR volunteers to build an easy-to-use database that allowed the Student Election Clerk Program to manage thousands of student applications, polling place assignments and communications far more efficiently. The Harris County Elections Administrator team used the resulting system to process more than 7,000 applications and staff more than 700 student clerks across more than 100 polling locations over the early voting and Election Day periods. The Harris County team also won a 2020 Clearinghouse Award from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, commonly known as a “Clearie” award, for its management of the state’s Student Election Clerk Program.
Interested in learning more about this project? Read the full story on USDR’s website.
The Scale Award, for sheer number of people impacted:
LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
Throughout the last year, U.S. Digital Response has partnered with five different departments and offices within Los Angeles County, collaboratively tackling 10 separate projects to serve its more than 10.4 million residents. The projects range from financial empowerment and workforce development to immigrant services and broadband access.
The LA County Department of Consumer & Business Affairs and its Center for Financial Empowerment joined forces with USDR to create a public-facing services map that enabled residents to locate nearby resources based on their individual needs. Similarly, the LA County Office of Immigrant Affairs partnered with USDR to improve immigrant access to services by releasing a newly designed website to serve as an open door for the more than 3.6 million immigrants living in LA County. This was one of the first times the county was able to visualize, in one place, all of the different services available to the immigrant community in LA County.
The Speed of Need Awards, for the fastest time to value:
THE CITY OF SEATTLE
Seattle was the first major U.S. city to come face-to-face with the COVID-19 crisis, and learned early on the impact of the illness as it spread quietly due to the lack of testing. In June 2020, as the city began reopening, the need to easily schedule and distribute testing was greater than ever.
The City of Seattle was two weeks away from launching its first drive-through COVID-19 testing site and needed an online tool for patient pre-registration. USDR connected the City with Solv Health, a health appointment booking company, which dedicated pro bono engineering time to adapt its easy-to-use booking tool to meet the needs of Seattle’s testing sites. Through this partnership, two testing sites were launched, with plans for additional sites, and appointment slots for COVID tests were full for several days after the appointment scheduler site went live. The testing sites processed seven patients every five minutes, resulting in thousands of tests administered each day. By December, six months after the sites launched, nearly 500,000 people had been tested using the City’s free sites.
Interested in learning more about this project? Read the full story on USDR’s website.
THE VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF ELECTIONS
In preparation for the 2020 elections, the State of Virginia needed to recruit new poll workers to manage the polling centers in the state’s 120+ local precincts. The process, which includes people signing up to work and sign-up lists being delivered periodically to the registrars in each locality, had been done manually in the past. Under the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to find new poll workers because it wasn’t safe for many existing workers to work, the manual processes would not be sustainable.
Within one week, the Virginia Department of Elections partnered with U.S. Digital Response to create an automated sign-up process using a Google Sheet, a form builder and a daily script that sent information to each local office. What’s more, this quick, creative solution was completely free to the Department of Elections because it used existing tools that the office was already able to access.
THE WISCONSIN DEPARTMENT OF WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) is embarking on a large-scale transformation of its legacy, mainframe-based unemployment insurance system — a process which could take years. As a first step, DWD connected with USDR’s dedicated unemployment insurance team to better understand their needs, receive light training about Agile software procurement practices, and help identify their path forward. Through this close collaboration, USDR and DWD identified 18F as a potential partner to help jumpstart the modernization process and an agreement between 18F and DWD was signed in an unprecedented 10 working days to get the work started.
USDR will continue working with DWD to augment 18F’s capacity and to help develop short- and long-term goals and plans.
The Demos, Not Memos Award, for the greatest iterative value achieved:
NEIGHBORHOOD PRESERVATION INC. MEMPHIS (NPI MEMPHIS)
As the effects of COVID-19 battered the Memphis economy, thousands of citizens are struggling to pay rent, and the city faces risks of mass evictions. To improve housing stability, NPI Memphis, in partnership with Memphis Area Legal Services and the University of Memphis Law School, put in place a program to match volunteer legal assistance and CARES Act funding with renters and landlords so they could reach settlements and improve housing stability in the area.
To streamline the hundreds of applications for legal aid that were overwhelming NPI Memphis legal clerks, USDR volunteers built an automated intake process that could screen applicants, collect required files and signatures and generate case files. The new system reduced the time it took for legal clerks to prepare a case by over 75 percent, allowing them to focus on client interactions and efficiently handing off cases for assignment. It successfully routed over 300 applications through the automated intake process, helping to mitigate and settle over 200 evictions. This year, we’ve continued our work with NPI Memphis and coalition partners to support their work in deploying Emergency Rental Assistance across Shelby County.
Interested in learning more about this project? Read the full story on USDR’s website.
The Ecosystem Awards, for the partners who used USDR to strengthen the overall ecosystem for the better:
NYC MAYOR’S OFFICE OF THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
In the spring of 2020, New York City was the first American city to be inundated with COVID-19 cases. City officials scrambled to identify technology solutions that could support crisis response, especially as it related to personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies. New York City quickly became one of USDR’s first partners. In one of our first engagements together, thirteen City agencies funneled their data into a PPE Dashboard MVP, built by USDR volunteers in less than three days, allowing the City to manage the PPE crisis in its hour of greatest need.
From there, the NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (MOCTO) continued to partner with USDR to address issues related to hospital capacity, broadband access, and public distribution of COVID-19 information. Beyond that, MOCTO teamed up with USDR to create the NYC[x] Innovation Fellows Program, which embedded teams of volunteer technologists within City agencies for eight- to ten-week sprints, with the end goal being a technology product that provides immediate value to the agency. In two cohorts of the NYC[x] program, the fellows have worked on projects related to continuous translation on City websites, minority- and women-owned business contract procurement, a service directory for elderly adults, and more.
COLORADO DIGITAL SERVICE
Colorado Digital Service (CDS) launched in late 2019 within the Governor’s Office of Information Technology to develop user-centered solutions for Colorado’s most pressing technical challenges. This diverse, cross-functional team of senior engineers, designers, product managers, and procurement specialists serves limited “tours of civic service” in government.
Throughout the last year, USDR and CDS have partnered on a series of projects, including supporting an IT help desk, coordinating exposure notifications, streamlining information about COVID-19 vaccines, and improving equity in the state’s public health communications. Learn more about CDS and its impact here.
NEW JERSEY OFFICE OF INNOVATION
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the New Jersey Department of Labor and the New Jersey Office of Innovation wanted to build a web-based tool to help workers understand their rights and eligibility for benefits programs. USDR volunteers partnered with the State of New Jersey to create a custom benefits screener tool that asks a few simple questions and then suggests, in priority order, which benefits programs a New Jersey worker can apply for based on eligibility.
Since that project, the New Jersey Office of Innovation has partnered with U.S. Digital Response to find solutions for various COVID-related issues, including providing support for small businesses and making vaccine appointments more accessible. Most recently, USDR closely collaborated with the New Jersey Office of Innovation and other partners to help the State develop a vaccine appointment finder solution that aggregates appointment availability information from the state’s major vaccine providers, using APIs and web scraping. New Jersey’s call center personnel have been using their vaccine appointment finder tool daily to book appointments for their inbound resident, and a user-friendly, accessible version of this appointment finder is now available to the general public to secure appointments on their own.
U.S. Digital Response has a team of pro bono technologists ready to help governments and NGOs respond to the critical needs of their communities. We’re fast, and we’re free. Fill out this brief intake form to connect with USDR, and we’ll be in touch within 24 hours.