Data helps TechBridge better coordinate care for families

TechBridge is a national non-profit, headquartered in Atlanta, with a mission of breaking the cycle of generational poverty through the innovative use of technology to transform non-profit and community impact. TechBridge provides technology career programming to provide technical instruction that leads to living-wage employment in the tech industry. TechBridge also assists nonprofit organizations across the US with their data and technology needs.

One organization TechBridge provides technology support to is the United Way of Greater Nashville’s Family Collective, which focuses on preventing and ending homelessness for families across 5 counties and 24 nonprofits. The data gathered across this ecosystem can determine predictable pathways out of poverty and homelessness.

But without reliable data, it’s hard to accomplish its mission. Changes in data across sources inhibited data sharing more broadly between groups and stakeholders. To scale to more counties and partners, the team knew they needed to move to a distributed system.

TechBridge decided to implement StreamSets to enable data sharing and care coordination across the 5 counties and 24 nonprofits and school systems in middle Tennessee. This allowed each partner to utilize their own client management system and enabled bi-directional data sharing between partners and funders.

TechBridge’s data intake system consists of multiple Salesforce instances, and StreamSets smart data pipelines send data back and forth between those instances, doing deduplication checks. Then, all data is aggregated into United Way’s main Salesforce instance so they can see families receiving programs and services and the outcomes achieved.

StreamSets fits nicely into TechBridge’s overall database modernization too. The team hosts a Snowflake database on AWS and is leveraging a database warehousing system that can be accessed by any data intake system. If they were just using SQL Server, they would have to be dependent on applications that sync with SQL Server. Since StreamSets and Snowflake are cloud-agnostic, they can sync with Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS.

With StreamSets enabling bi-directional data sharing, nonprofits can see the families they serve in common to better coordinate care. It’s easier to make sure those families have access to all the services and resources they need in so many areas: early childhood and K-12 education, transitional shelters, affordable housing, youth development and mentoring, afterschool programming, workforce development, and financial coaching.

TechBridge hopes to bring this data-sharing ecosystem to additional communities to move more families out of experiencing homelessness.