Old Skool Cafe
What is Old Skool Cafe?
Old Skool Cafe is a supper club run by at-risk youth aged 16-24 in San Francisco. It works as a violence prevention program and provides training, jobs and a second chance at life for youth coming out of incarceration, foster care and situations of abuse and neglect. Through its life coaching and workforce training programs, Old Skool Cafe aims to break the cycle of incarceration among at-risk youth. Old Skool creates bonds and forms foundations to support them through the ups and downs of their lives and long after they leave the cafe.
“We are about coaching through creating relationships where these kids are – literally and figuratively and emotionally.”
The Challenge
Old Skool Cafe is a small organization with two case workers who provide coaching and mentoring support for young people in the program. With limited resources and limited size, Old Skool was forced to use a paper based system to capture details regarding the youth that they were serving and documentation such as surveys and consent forms. With the organization standing at the cusp of expanding and opening new agencies, Old Skool needed to find a way to manage information digitally in a manner that would allow them to provide the context required to report back to funders about how the lives of their youth’s were improving.
The goal, from a technology perspective, was to find a modern solution that would allow them to digitally maintain the details of their coaching sessions to provide that outcome-centric context, and give them the flexibility to capture information in real-time while creating relationships with youth “where they are”. As this is a not-for-profit organisation that relies on funding, the solution also needed to be affordable.
All data captured in notebooks about children, their communities and case related information was copied and stored in paper files in their office. This process was inefficient and time-consuming.
The Solution
Old Skool Cafe partnered with Diona to implement Diona Visits, hosted on the Microsoft Azure Cloud, for their case managers. With the use of Diona Visits solution and the Diona Data Manager, Old Skool can now maintain a digital record of all of their youth's progress through case notes, while simplifying the process of capturing forms (e.g., releases), completing surveys, and sharing information electronically with their young people.
“We need to meet the youth where they are, and this solution is going to help us do that.”