Z Technology Innovation Awards – Outdated

Eligible nonprofits must: 

• Be a 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 charitable organization (as defined by the Internal Revenue Services), other than: churches and organizations whose primary mission is to promote a religion; private schools, colleges, or universities; nonprofit hospitals or cooperative hospital service organizations; and governmental units.
• Demonstrate fiscal responsibility, which is defined by adherence to general accounting standards.
• Be inclusive and embrace diversity; does not discriminate in service delivery and employment on any basis including ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or religion.
• Have an annual operating budget of at least $500,000.
• Able to send a representative to the Tech Forward Conference this September

1. Part One: Eligibility (must meet all requirements above)
2. Part Two: Organizational Information
   1. Organization Name
   2. EIN #
   3. Website URL
   4. Primary Contact Information
   5. Annual Budget
3. Part Three: Organizational Background
   1. Mission
   2. Offered Services
   3. Key Constituents
   4. Additional, Relevant Background (if applicable)
4. Part Four: Technology Project
   1. Project Name | Project Teaser Description
   2. Full Project Description
   3. Target Timeline & Dates
   4. Draft Project Budget (Attach)
5. Part Five: Project Impact
   1. Target Impact
      1. Program | Internal Operations Impact
      2. Services | External Constituents Impact
   2. Lifespan of Impact / Measurable Metrics

Support Center for Child Advocates teams specially trained volunteer attorneys with staff social workers and lawyers to advance our mission “to advocate for victims of child abuse and neglect, with the goal of securing safety, justice, well-being and a permanent, nurturing environment for every child.” We serve children and youth from birth to age 21 by representing them in abuse and neglect proceedings, advocating to secure services and permanent homes, finalizing adoptions, when appropriate, and helping clients testify in court.

Project: Project: Electronic personal records are widely used by families and service providers, yet foster youth rarely have easy access to their own essential life documents. Without family who can keep their “papers,” they leave foster care without a home for their information and unprepared for post-system independence.
We want to advance services to older youth who are approaching the end of their involvement in the child welfare system— SCCA seeks funding to create and advance an exciting new initiative, our Digital Locker Program, which will provide our young clients and others in the child welfare system with an electronic system for storing their most valued documents—birth certificates, school transcripts, health records, ID. These vital documents often go missing during transitions to new placements and to independent living, creating difficulties and delays for our clients in obtaining employment and entering training and school programs
Once developed, we hope to implement Digital Lockers across the city and region—with statewide replication as a future possibility.

Family & Children’s Aid is a community-based non-profit organization that offers innovative and responsive services to heal and support children, families, and individuals in their time of need. We have been serving our community since 1809, and are now the largest outpatient children’s mental health care provider in Western Connecticut.

Project: Family & Children’s Aid requests support for implementing our project: “Therapeutic Technology Tools (Triple T)” to incorporate new and innovative interactive technology in our mock subway station–Harmony Station and to create a toy store to help children who have abused, neglected or traumatized to continue their therapy. With this award, we can implement new technology in our “shops” changing the whole experience for a child and helping the 6,000 clients we serve from low-income backgrounds. In keeping with our innovative incentive program for children who have been abused or neglected, we would like to turn a storage room into a toy store. Not just any toy store, but something very unique. The current location of our storage room is adjacent to where we have our “Harmony Station” subway car.

We could convert the plain storage room into a train car and the incorporation of technology will be key in engaging our clients of all ages (typically ranging from 3 to 18). We would like to install screens on the walls to simulate being on a moving train which we would change the images seasonally. We would also like to install a miniature subway set and tracks that could be triggered with a button to go run throughout the top of the store.

In addition, we would like to update the interface of the mock subway train, which currently has flat images of switches to have real working switches and lights to make it more interactive.

Turtle Island Restoration Network mission is to education, inspire mobilize people in local communities around the world to take action to protect marine wildlife and the oceans and inland watersheds that sustain life on Earth. Our work is buoyed by thousands of supporters, volunteers and pro bono professionals, who help us extend our network around the globe.

Project:  Adding to our cutting-edge research at on sharks, Turtle Island Restoration Network has launched a research project to determine if a computer algorithm can do what the human eye can’t— recognize individual sharks. This project will evaluate the application of computer vision and deep convolutional neural networks to hammerhead mark-recapture. This will link photographs of individual sharks across the data sets of researchers and divers, creating longer and geographically wider life histories for each animal.  If successful, this could revolutionize shark studies and would improve our understanding of population size, longevity, site residency, and movement, such as migration between known resident hot spots, currently and even looking back in time if we can mine historical photos. This data is critical to conservation of shark species around the world.

This new method would also allow researchers worldwide to avoid current mark-recapture methods that require physically invasive tagging after capture by long line fishing or tagging with a spear gun, and allow scuba divers to become “citizen scientists,” and contribute to conservation science. The mark and recapture method is commonly used in ecology to estimate an animal population’s by marking a number of individuals in a natural population, returning them to that population, and later recapturing some of them as a basis for estimating the size of the population at the time of marking and release. The study is being conducted by computer scientist Jason Holberg from Wild Me (who created the Whale Shark photo id project), and Charles Stewart, Professor of Computer Science and Department Head at Rensselaer Polytechnic.