Today I saw a LinkedIn post from the Afterschool Alliance that announced an "EcoGIS: Mapping Environmental Justice and Beyond" program. I followed the links and the first took me to an article with the map shown below.
The article started, by saying it is part of the Afterschool Alliance's Collective For Youth Empowerment in STEM and Society (CYESS) Initiative. It shows work done by youth through a program of CYESS.
Before I followed that link I read the article and saw that the EcoGIS project was part of a flagship program Mapping Justice. That really caught my attention since the name of this blog, started in 2008, is MappingForJustice.
I followed that link and learned that it's a program based in Florida and supported by a group called "Trubel &Co" that provides "civic tech education to turn local data into community action" through "specialized workshops that explore the intersections of justice, data storytelling, and technology, giving students, nonprofits, and advocates an opportunity to learn technical skills and engage with critical issues pertaining to their communities".
I have links to the CYESS program on this page in the Tutor/Mentor library.
So today I took a new look at the "Collective for Youth Empowerment in STEM and Society" program. This is their home page.
Click on the "Projects" link in the top menu and you'll find the page shown below.
Then click on the "toolkit" button under the "Civic Engagement Resources" paragraph. This is a huge resource. As I looked through this section I was hoping to see how the initial maps and information collected by students was part of on-going efforts to share the information and get more people involved in solving the problems highlighted by the maps.
I found a lot more than that.
But I'm not sure if I found maps showing organizations working to solve these problems, with an analysis of "are there enough?" "or are different types of programs also needed?" More important, were there blog articles and public awareness campaigns trying to draw volunteers and donors directly to the programs doing the work?
I don't know if anyone on their team has ever visited this blog or my website, but that's what my maps have been used for. Below are links to three visual essays that I hope some of the leaders of these programs will study.
- "Getting Attention for a Cause" - click here
- "Rest of the Story" - role youth can take to draw attention to causes - click here
- "Rest of the Story - example focused on one Chicago community area" - click here
This entire blog is a resource that anyone learning to create maps might use to find ideas for how the maps can be used in on-going campaigns. On the Tutor/Mentor blog you can find nearly 300 articles showing uses of maps in one set of articles on the blog.
Then, look at this concept map which shows the 4-part information-based problem solving strategy that I've piloted since 1993.
Most of the problems that GIS maps highlight are complex and will take many people, and many years, to solve. Without people focusing on all four of these steps, from year-to-year, most of these problems will still be with us many years from now.
Thank you to the Afterschool Alliance for launching the CYESS program and for sharing it on LinkedIn. I hope anyone reading this will take time to dig through all the articles on their site. It's a great resource.
Furthermore, I hope you'll add a link from your resource page to my blogs, concept maps and visual essays.
On these sites I show a 30 year history of collecting and sharing information. In 20 or 30 years I hope that some of the projects created through CYESS in 2026 will have websites and blogs showing their own long-term efforts at bringing people together to try to solve some of these complex problems.
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