Resilient American Communities use the tools below to amplify public health messaginf, gather information and to help communities organize to keep COVID-19 out of their homes and neighborhoods.

The tools currently used by RAC have been used in low income communities to respond to disasters, including the current COVID-19 pandemic with its attendant secondary and tertiary effects. Both the way RAC Tools are used and the way they are introduced to the communities have been greatly influenced by both observing people who are highly motivated to help their low income communities confront complex problems and by listening to comments these same people have made about their expanded use of the tools once they have become proficient at using them.

RAC Tools are either developed for use in response to specific needs stated by community leaders or are free and open source tools commonly used among collaborators in the US. Therefore, RAC Tools build community capacity, increase job skills among participants and help to bridge the digital divide. By using RAC Tools to address problems in a collaborative environment addressing acute community needs, residents simultaneously learn and apply media and technology literacy skills that bridge the digital divide.  

Use of these tools in a community setting with training and support from RAC and from other publicly available videos and online software instruction enable residents to become proficient on tools that are used in workplaces and in whole of society collaborative efforts to share information across disciplines and across the spectrum of socioeconomic status. 

The tools described below are used to: assess community conditions, communicate conditions in the community effectively both to residents and to those outside the community, coordinate field teams, hold meetings, disseminate accurate and actionable information and to support project management. 

Resilience Systems

RAC uses Resilience Systems, which have open data and open source data sharing platforms that support collaborative activity at their core. Although the Resilience Systems have many capabilities, the work groups with mail-handler support, forums and task manager are being used in COVID response. 

Resilience System Work Groups facilitate communication between RAC Liaisons and community teams working on specific issues. RAC Liaisons receive emails of group posts and the posts provide an archive of correspondence among collaborators with a prescribed scope of work on a Drupal platform with mail-handler support. Public groups can be viewed by the public. Only those registered in the Resilience System can post.

The data management team that is working across FL RAC communities pulls and archives the FDOH daily cases in the Resilience System by zip code, cases by county and case line reports. KLM and CSV files are pulled for the zip code and county data. CSV files are pulled for all 3 files. Each RAC site has a Leadership Coordination Work Group and may have work groups of various names that perform these functions: Outreach, Mapping, Data Management & Reporting, and Education. Additional Work Groups are formed as needed. 

Resilience System Mail Handlers support collaborative communications. Information posted to work groups is sent to the email inbox of all work group members. If recipients respond to the post, their response appears as a comment to the original post in the work group. Work group members can post to the work group by sending an email to the work group’s group email address. 

Community Dashboards

Each RAC site receives a Dashboard Template that is localized. It includes a link to a Resilience System, links to authoritative public health information at the county and state DOH level and to the CDC specific guidance and bi-lingual resources, FAQs about COVID, and downloadable flyers and posters are also available in a variety of languages. The English Dashboard page is linked to a local source of Spanish information or to a Spanish COVID resource page. The Dashboard Template includes an embedded map. Access to the RAC.us portal is provided on each dashboard, through which RAC site leadership can access their surveys as well as the visualization of survey results. The template undergoes co-design with community leaders, so existing heavily used dashboards may include a Facebook feed from the anchor organization, descriptions of the primary collaborative strategic interventions of the group (mask sewing and distribution, outreach team building, case management, food distribution, etc.), trusted local news sources, Google Form Surveys designed by the community partners to gather information for their needs, attached Googledocs with content controlled by different work groups, cutting edge news about COVID, links to policy and guidance relevant to the stage of the pandemic, community partner acknowledgements with links to their websites and Facebook pages. All RAC sites have community dashboards, which unify community partners. One person at each RAC site is given editor status for the community dashboard. The community dashboards are on a Word Press website with a Divi theme linked in many ways to the Drupal-based Resilience Systems platform. Due to Divi’s holonic (nested) archivability that supports rapid prototyping, portability, global update capability, elements that support localization, and potential for direct content management by people in communities with widely varying educational levels, and back end observation and supervision of same. Features of Divi include:

RAC.us  Dashboards

RAC.us  Dashboards are accessible through community dashboards. National and Regional Decision Support Dashboards are available to all RAC sites. . RAC.us Dashboards can be accessed on each comunity dashboard. The Decision Support Dashboards have filtering and sorting capabilities that enable rapid assessment of trends and the ability to aggregate geographical units that may share interlocal agreements or other common governance constructs.  

Google Forms

Google Forms are used (1) to take notes during Listening Sessions (2) to conduct community surveys that do not collect personal health information and (3) to allow project management reports and tracking forms to be submitted without face to face contact. Google Forms with specific fields related to a Listening Session agenda can be filled out by more than one person in attendance virtually or in person. The notes are visible real time in shared spreadsheets. The spreadsheet format  provides structure that assists in information retrieval and identification of actionable themes. The link to the spreadsheet populated by the notes taken by scribes at the meeting can be shared among collaborators in real time and with those who will analyze the data later.

RAC.us  Survey Forms

RAC.us Survey Forms are accessible through the Medical and Public Health Information Sharing Environment (MPHISE) portal through links on all RAC Community Dashboards.  The RAC.us platform is a secure environment essential to the collection of private and medical information. Data entered into the survey forms on mobile devices carries geospatial metadata. Survey results appear on community dashboards within the RAC.us HIPAA compliant platform.

RAC.us offers two types of surveys that can be accessed through RAC community dashboards: (1) Public RAC .us Surveys that display localized survey questions after entering a community based on geolocation and (2) protected Surveys that display localized surveys/questions based on your designated community within the RAC.us platform. RAC.us provides a secure environment for personal health data as well as analytics which culminate in visualizations of community survey results on RAC.us community dashboards.

Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing platform with recording capability, exchange of text information through a chat window, screen sharing and both transferable hosting and co-hosting. Weekly meetings are held using Zoom during the COVID pandemic. These weekly meetings include a Community COVID Situation Report that presents county, zip code (where available) and municipal data (where available) to the RAC community partners, changes and additions to the dashboard, map update overview, work group reports, and strategic intervention planning. Zoom is also used for Work Group meetings, online trainings, community COVID Town Halls, workshops and Serious Games.

Googlesheets: Data Workbook for COVID Tracking

At RACs doing case tracking and analysis, a Googlesheets collaborative workbook with at least the following sheets is used: Data sources and protocols, County Zip Code cases (if available in the state) with COVID case curves for each, city case data, and DOH county data with COVID case curves. Florida RACs pull a variety of reports and archive them to create a unique URL that is entered on the respective sheet in the workbook. Florida RACs also pull some or all of these: FDEM Report Links, FDEM pulled data, FDOH Correctional Institution Report Links, FDOH Long Term Care Facility Links, Bay County Disparity Reports (created from data on other sheets in the workbook), cases 1-600 Medical Examiner Reports, Florida census zip code data by ZCTA, FDOH Pediatric Report, and both the State of Florida and County vaccination summary reports. Data Workbooks are used to create the hyperlocal Weekly Community COVID Sit Reps that inform outreach and strategic interventions.

Google Maps

Google MyMaps is a free and open-source collaborative platform for presenting geospatial data. Each community may choose to create a COVID tracking map by zip code (where available) with COVID test sites and vaccination sites if this information isn’t readily available in the community. Communities have 7 layers available to them in each map. Mapping Tools can therefore be created to support decision making. RAC sites are creating maps of many themes: Assets and Liabilities, Resources, COVID Test Sites, Food Sources, Disparities and Social Determinants of Health of various kinds.

Once community leaders have the Google Mapping skill they begin to use it for many other purposes. These currently include mapping the people who frequent any given food distribution center, mapping environmental hazards associated with negative COVID outcomes, mapping businesses that are CDC compliant, mapping farms and other local food sources, and mapping Social Determinants of Health indicators to determine how to provide support to overcome barriers to accessing vaccinations.

Fulcrum

Fulcrum is a collaborative mobile data collection platform that can be used with iOS or Android when personal health information is not collected; Apps can be easily created to digitize any form being used to collect information: text, photos, videos (with some accounts), accepts signatures, reads bar codes, can record information without connectivity and synchronize the data when the phone or tablet is reconnected. The data is simultaneously captured in a spreadsheet and mapped. The data can be exported in these formats: CSV (.csv), Excel XLSX (.xlsx), ESRI File Geodatabase (.gdb), ESRI Shapefile (.shp), SpatiaLite (.sqlite), SQLite (.sqlite), PostgreSQL (.sql), KML (.kml), GeoJSON (.geojson). CSV files and shapefiles (.shp, .shx, and .dbf zipped together) of secondary data or primary data collected elsewhere can be imported. COVID Needs Assessments, demographic surveying, hurricane recovery surveying including documentation of external household condition and parcel data, environmental hazard mapping, and food distribution mapping have been undertaken by RAC sites.

Image By NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons