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Power BI helps Homeless and Troubled Youth

Remember the recent blogs about the folks at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF) who are using Power BI to help prevent and eliminate Pediatric AIDS? And the folks at the Center for Oceans at Conservation International (CI) who are using Power BI to improve ocean health? Well one reader was so inspired by those amazing people and their stories, that he set out to find a way he could use Power BI to make a difference.

As part of our Using Power BI for the Greater Good blog series, we talked with Power BI Super User and 2019 Super User of the Year, Greg Deckler.

Greg works for Fusion Alliance, a company that is involved with a lot of charities. One of its partners sits on the Board of Buckeye Ranch, an organization that provides treatment for troubled youth. Their HR Director sits on the Board of Huckleberry House, a place that provides help and shelter for homeless youth. Both are located in Columbus, Ohio. After seeing what other groups were doing with Power BI to help make the world a better place, Greg asked himself, “How can we do something good in our community?”

He contacted the Board members and the Power BI User Group he started and told them about his desire to do something local similar to the global efforts of EGPAF and CI. Fusion Alliance had sponsored hackathons in the past where a bunch of developers get together on a Saturday and use technology to benefit a charity. They even hammered out Buckeye Ranch’s website in an afternoon.

So the concept was to sponsor a hackathon around Buckeye Ranch’s and Huckleberry House’s data and use Power BI to give them meaningful insights.

To get started, Greg met with the CFO and the Director of Huckleberry House and asked them, “Hey, what can we do? What kind of data do you have and what can we do with it that would be valuable to you?”

Currently, Greg and his team are in the process of gathering that data and cleaning it up so they can work with it. The next step will be for his User Group to take a Saturday, get as many developers as possible there, and use Power BI to build a model, create calculations, and create visualizations in order to glean insights from the data.

Greg says that one of the reasons he came to work for Fusion Alliance seven years ago was because of all of their community involvement. He hopes his story, inspired by our previous blogs, will go on to inspire others to find new ways to use Power BI for the Greater Good.

Have you used Power BI for the greater good? Tell us about your experiences!

And stay tuned, as we will check back with Greg in the coming weeks to see how the hackathon turned out!

Comments

This is awesome! Way to go, Greg!

 

I am also involved with a couple of non-profits, and would love some ideas and examples of how they apply Power BI to these charities.