On July 15th, the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team presented their work. The Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team is a program funded by the Bloomberg Foundation and is working to improve the delivery of social services in Chicago.
The Innovation Delivery Team is working closely with the Department of Family and Support Services to help improve social services. The city currently directs over $200 million in city, state, and federal funds to help deliver social services including the management of six community services centers spread out across Chicago. These service centers help with a variety of needs including rental assistance, affordable housing options, shelter referrals, and helping residents apply for public aid.
One of the main challenges that the department is connecting people to the right resources. Because different parts of government and non-profits deliver different services, it’s not always easy to keep track. Additionally, the systems that each agency uses do not talk to each other and so just because one agency has information, the other may not have them in their system at all. Nor would an agency necessarily know what other resources are available nearby.
There have been a few efforts to try to address this including civic startup Purple Binder and our own Chicago Health Atlas Project.
Here’s the team explaining more:
If you’d like to help, the Innovation Delivery Team is looking for possible solutions they can pilot in the fall and will be at hack nights regularly to meet with civic innovators.
