Dear Reader,
As the rest of the world was forced to make major adjustments due to Covid, New England Give Camp also had to change. For those of my readers who aren’t familiar with New England Give Camp, Give Camp is a nationwide organization that organizes technical professionals for a weekend code-a-thon to write solutions for non-profits.
Each year has a theme and sometimes a challenge. This year’s challenge was remote colloboration spread across many states whereas we are all usually on site. “Eleven Is Heaven” was this year’s theme because it’s our eleventh meeting and always a joy to do good in the world. There is never a year that goes by that I don’t experience a strong mixture of heartache and joy. The heartache comes from witnessing some of the need for our services and the joy is knowing the help we provide.
Although I am a veteran Give Camper, I was unsure about the logistics and how we would get into our teams. Usually we meet in the large area then find each other and find a working space. I was nervous because I always want to do the best work I can. Fortunately, the organizers used Slack to create the teams and we were able to move forward with the projects from there.
This year, I was honored to work with the Lakota Youth Stay organization and it’s mission “… to foster authentic, mutually rewarding and sustainable friendships between Native American youth and people in Eastern Massachusetts with the goal of inspiring hope and creating cultural understanding and awareness.” Lakota Youth Stay had begun a Pen Pal program to prevent the children from losing invaluable connections during the pandemic. The program had grown so quickly that the data was unmanageable. They had to put the program on hold leaving over 100 children without resrouces and many more unable to sign up.
I served with a senior software engineer and a retired database developer and with Joy Harris, the Founder and Excutive Director of Lakota Youth Stay. This year, I felt like we were the A-Team. “I love it when a plan comes together.” – John “Hannibal” Smith from The A-Team. Despite my earlier fears, we were quickly and efficiently working together to wrangle Joy’s data and get her a functioning system. From a database standpoint, this was a fairly simple problem to solve. I had the data cleaned up fairly quickly. The next day, the team worked to get a system built from the cleaned data that the non-profit would be able to use. A bit more data manipulation was necessary as we had to merge a couple spreadsheets. We were able to create a functioning sign up form so the non-profit would no longer be required to manually enter the data.
As a Data Manager, Data is more than just numbers on a spreadsheet. The data tells me stories. A story began to unfold as I worked with the data. Many people’s phone numbers changed frequently – even monthly. The mailing addresses would change frequently as well. The children didn’t always have the same parent / guardian. It began to remind me of the poor neighbors I knew when I lived in Providence. As I was writing this blog and reading more about the South Dakota reservation I was horrified. Per the webpage about the Pine Ridge Reservation, I learned that :
- Annual per capita income: $7,000
- Unemployment: 85 – 90%
- Alcoholism: 80 – 85%
- 97% live below the federal poverty level
- Life expectancy is 48 years for men; 52 years for woman
- Teen suicide rate is 2.5 times higher than the US national average
- School drop-out rate is 70%
- 35% of the household on Pine ridge have no indoor plumbing; 39% have no electricity
- Most people have limited access to quality health care
- There are minimal preventative health care programs
- There is limited public transportation
- There are no major retail stores on the reservation. There is one grocery store and a number of convenience stores.
My heart broke (again). I think I’ve begun measuring the need and success of these weekends in the number of kleenex I go through while I do this work. I’m horrified that people live in these conditions in the United States with the resources we have. I’m gratified that I can do something to help. If any of my readers are considering supporting an organization, I would recommend this one. There are small ways and large ways to get involved that can make an enormous impact on the quality of life for these folks.
My nieces and nephew helped me pick out clothes, become more tech savvy and introduced me to Facebook. Seeing children courageously and tirelessly work for a world where terrorists and bullies are not the norm reminds me why we are all here.
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