Photo: AI-Housing-dreamstime_s_132569593

Baltimore pilots ‘digital document locker’ for homeless residents

11 March 2021

by Sarah Wray

The City of Baltimore has launched an online tool to give people experiencing homelessness a secure place to manage digital copies of essential documents they need to obtain housing services.

‘My Digital Data Locker Baltimore’ allows Mayor’s Office of Homeless Services (MOHS) clients to securely store and share electronic copies of documents such as birth certificates and government-issued identification cards with housing case managers and benefits programme staff.

This aims to streamline one of the critical steps to securing permanent housing and avoid obstacles related to documents being lost, stolen or destroyed.

Clients can manage their own accounts on the platform and control who has access to their documents.

The initiative has been led by the MOHS and Baltimore’s Continuum of Care (CoC), a collaborative body which co-ordinates homelessness efforts.

“To eliminate homelessness, we must eliminate the barriers that stand in the way of our neighbours accessing housing,” said Mayor Brandon M. Scott. “I want to thank MOHS, the CoC and all of our partners for using technology and ingenuity to close the gap between people experiencing homelessness and their access to permanent housing.”

According to the latest available data, approximately 5,230 people in Baltimore experienced homelessness at some point over the course of a year.

Collaboration

The My Digital Data Locker Baltimore solution is a result of public, private and non-profit collaboration.

MOHS approached Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring together stakeholders, including Baltimore CoC, local housing service providers and people who have experienced homelessness, to create a secure document management prototype.

New America’s Digital Impact and Governance Initiative (DIGI) further refined and developed the tool with partners and the resulting managed service is built on a serverless cloud-native architecture. The serverless development model aims to make applications faster and cheaper to deploy, and easier to scale.

During the three-month pilot, MOHS and service provider case managers will beta test the software. Other US city homeless services agencies could also trial it later this year working with New America, a think tank and civic innovation organisation.

The code developed for the solution by technical design studio Two Bulls is open source and available on Github.

Funders for the project include New America, Kaiser Permanente, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Baltimore Civic Fund is the project manager for ongoing operations.

The pilot is part of a broader strategy to reduce homelessness in Baltimore. It includes a Rapid Rehousing Program and a partnership between MOHS and the Maryland Department of Transportation Motor Vehicle Administration to secure state-issued identification cards for people experiencing homelessness, helping them gather the documents they need to receive housing.

Image: Daniil Peshkov | Dreamstime.com

  • Reuters Automotive
https://cities-today.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Dawn-crop.png

Technology inclusion goes beyond internet access in LA

  • Reuters Automotive