AREA SERVED

Gainesville, Florida, is the county seat of Alachua County, with a population of approximately 129,394. According to the Census Bureau, an estimated 33.6% of Gainesville residents live below the poverty line.

BACKGROUND

Alisa Guthrie, a social worker in the city’s public defender’s office, founded the Gainesville chapter in 2016. Like many other social workers and case managers, Alisa used to spend a significant amount of time looking up resources for her clients and keeping her referrals up to date. She would come out of a day of meetings and find that a client had been waiting for hours to ask her for the phone number for a food bank or child care program. She had become a gatekeeper to these vital resources for her clients. She wanted to do better for them and for herself by empowering her clients to find the information they need on their own.

Alisa discovered One Degree and realized it could help her and her clients move beyond outdated paper binders and a mess of post-it notes of crucial resource information. She decided to start a One Degree chapter for Gainesville.

Over several months, Alisa organized students from the University of Florida and other community members to volunteer their time to add local resources to One Degree. One by one, they used One Degree’s Resource Editing Tool to build a database of resources that Alisa and hundreds of others now use and share with their clients. The entire community is now empowered to access resources directly thanks to the work of Alisa and her team.

Learn more: “How One Social Worker Improved the Safety Net for a Whole City”.