CIVIC-PG Track B: Leveraging a Resource Sharing Platform for Long-Term Mutual Aid and Responsiveness to Emergent Needs

The purpose of this project is to plan, pilot, and study approaches to nonprofit organizations’ resource-sharing and community building. The ultimate aim is to maximize nonprofits' potential for positive and efficient impact on their common geographies and missions. The research team employs community-engaged, human-centered design to improve and scale a previously developed resource-sharing technology tool. The tool is a scalable, generalizable platform that can play a critical role in supporting communities as they pursue contextual, localized solutions and collective impact. The goal is to facilitate stronger collaboration among nonprofit organizations to address some of the most pressing challenges they face. This project emphasizes community-driven, resource-rich collaborations with technology while activating community assets. The team is also studying differences between short- and long-term needs and collective impact, and the potential impact of their resource-sharing platform on mutual aid behaviors and values in the face of emergency situations. The team is actively expanding to new cohorts in Worcester, MA and in the Lehigh Valley, PA. Both are communities transitioning from post-industrial economies, while contending with problems of houselessness, immigration, and emergency response. New mechanisms are being developed to conduct recurrent multilateral combinatorial exchanges paired with community norms and practices to connect technology with human dynamics. Such a tool will enable nonprofit organizations to temporarily share their resources and develop a responsive community of practice. The research team is seeking to understand the tool and related ecosystem qualitatively and quantitatively and how it can have transformative impact on communities. This project will inform a framework to measure transformative impact and to illuminate how the resource sharing platform can aid in the collective impact of communities, meet emerging needs responsively and flexibly, and form cohorts to enable shared communities of practice. This project contributes to a functional understanding of the characteristics and success factors for collective impact efforts in addressing community needs and challenges. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program’s Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.