Placement Finder

After working closely with several people in the helping field (group home employees, social workers, etc), I had heard that finding placement for an individual in crisis is mostly done manually. Of course, a database with the right data to determine availability would be great, but to keep it up to date would put additional burden on the on-site staff at these locations unless it were part of a widely-adopted system in the industry. As an intermediate step toward better access of relevant placement information, I developed some Python scripts that scraped the State of Minnesota's DHS website for data related to these facilities across the state. I then used geopy and Google's Geocoding API to turn the addresses into GPS coordinates. From there, I was able to pull the data into a Leaflet map for easy visualization and navigation.

The Map

Please click here to check it out. Please note that the CSV of data was last updated 2016-05-25 and should not be considered complete or 100% accurate.