Current Live Challenges
Goodwill-Suncoast Challenge
Currently, operation inefficiencies deny Goodwill the opportunity to direct funding to address critical community needs. Goodwill is challenging the community to create an inexpensive system that will track information on donated items from point final disposition to retail store. Creating this system will help to enable Goodwill to continue its track record of global giving.
Thousands of items are donated to Goodwill every day. However, there is no automated way to track inventory across Goodwill’s 20 retail stores creating the need for a massive amount of manual labor and driving an inefficient process. This tool will provide several important benefits to Goodwill:
- A wide variety of merchandise requires tagging. This will allow Goodwill to identify and track product movement of over 100 million items annually.
- Regarding inventory loss as well as processing and stocking needs, all of which impact revenue
- Enable Goodwill to transition to a self-checkout system so that wages can be reallocated as the organization implements higher wages for other relevant jobs
- Improve and expedite rotation of goods on schedule, which is critical to success in the resale business.
- At point of pricing a wide variety of merchandise must be priced and tagged. This system needs to accommodate this variety.
Block by Block
The Block by Block Food Insecurity Challenge is a three-month social competition that is open to social innovators, local non-profits, grass roots community efforts and other organizations that have the ability to sustainably deploy innovative approaches to solving critical barriers to food security in their communities.
Availability: Supply
Food insecure communities rely on the availability of a dependable food supply chain. Solutions in this area focus on efficient production and distribution of food resources to increase availability, affordability, and sustainability of the supply of food to insecure communities.
Access: Demand
Often called “food deserts,” food insecure populations reside more than one mile or more from sources of healthy food such as fresh fruit, vegetables and healthy whole foods that are commonly found in large grocery stores, farmers’ markets and other healthy food providers. Without transportation to healthy food locations, these populations are reliant on quick marts where processed or packaged foods higher in sugars and fats are typical offered. Solutions in this area focus on accessibility to whole food resources, distribution points, or finding the means to pay for delivery of nutritious stable food resources.
Utilization: Capacity
Improving nutrition and food security often involves changing behavior. Holistic policies focused on infrastructure and education of how to properly process and store fresh food to alleviate waste and education on how to prepare nutritious food to combat under-nutrition will be the focus in this area. Properly educating and training households on healthy food alternatives, proper nutrition, waste reduction, preparation and storage will build strong relationships with fresh food.
Reliance: Sustainability
Mitigation or quick recovery from shocks to households like food price volatility, weather, illness, age or economic loss is a fundamental pillar across all food insecurity challenges. Solutions in this area will focus on how to stabilize or soften these shocks to effectively rebound or better prepare households against external forces that affect their access, utilization, and availability to stable food sources.
YMCA of the Suncoast
The YMCA of the Suncoast implements several evidence-based community health programs. Each program collects a variety of data to track a participant through the program, evaluate success and measure outcomes. We need help modernizing these process from paper forms and Excel spreadsheets to a more user friendly, digital format.
The YMCA serves thousands of Floridians each year, supporting their health and fitness journey. The YMCA’s Enhance® Fitness program serves more than 650 older adults in three city locations and is run in partnership with other Tampa Bay area YMCAs.
Currently, the staff does not have a user-friendly and efficient data management tool to track and analyze a participant’s progress as well as metrics to measure program success. Data input is primarily managed by the YMCA staff and completed manually.
This inefficiency has had several consequences:
- A backlog of data needing to be entered because it is so time consuming.
- Inability to measure impact and make necessary adjustments for each member and the program overall.
- Inability to accurately analyze data from questionnaires, enrollment forms, the Promis 29 survey, activity participation to measure success and enable the YMCA to apply for additional grants to expand the program.
AireHealth
AireHealth wants the brightest innovators, focused on improving access to healthcare in Florida by making respiratory care more effective, easier and enjoyable. Simply put, we want to develop the best user experience possible for a child receiving care for asthma and their caregivers.
AireHealth sees the therapy potential to positively impact 100+ million people in the US including 29 million “wheezy” kids utilizing a nebulizer for respiratory illness. Today’s drug delivery tools have antiquated technology, are bulky, loud, can scare kids and often frustrate adults. And worse than that, you have a hard time measuring their effectiveness.
How can you help? Help us deliver an innovative solution that allows a child to receive their treatments more consistently, even while on the go in a silent, effective and not so scary way.
With our already FDA Cleared Class II device and connected app, now under development, AireHealth will increase respiratory drug delivery adherence by unlocking accessibility, affordability and connectivity through a more proactive approach. Why? Proactive respiratory care improves lives and lowers costs, especially for the pediatric population and the ones who provide care to them.