Aunt Bertha: A social services search tool for Camden
Edit: Our Aunt Bertha program is now referred to as My Camden Resources. You can access the search tool at mycamdenresources.org.
The Camden Coalition has partnered with public benefit company Aunt Bertha to provide a free, comprehensive, user-friendly social services search tool for Camden County.
The website camdenhealth.auntbertha.com functions like a Yelp for social services: providers or individuals can enter their zip code and find an up-to-date list of services providing food, health, housing, transportation, employment, and more. The list can be narrowed by eligibility criteria like age, income, household size, and disability. Listings for services show hours, contact information, eligibility, and also provide a tool to send a listing by email — to another provider, a client, or a friend.
For health providers, social workers, case managers, and others, finding the right social services for patients in need can be daunting, and it’s often even harder for individuals to track down resources on their own. Our collaboration with Aunt Bertha began when we realized that we had the same problem as many other health and social services organizations: while members of our care teams each had a wealth of specialized knowledge of local resources, that knowledge was not accessible or useable for the organization as a whole.
We started by creating a shared resource library using Google Drive, but it was difficult to navigate and keep up-to-date. Partnering with Aunt Bertha was the perfect solution: they had the technology to easily conduct a web scraping of resources in a defined set of zip codes, a user-friendly platform, and built-in functionality to send edits and updates as services change. The Camden Aunt Bertha site will function as a crowdsourced database that gets smarter and more comprehensive as more and more people use it.
The Camden Coalition is sending our Americorps health coaches to train our partner health providers to use the Aunt Bertha site to connect their patients to resources. The site is free and accessible for both individuals looking for services as well as providers looking to help connect clients to services. To set up a training on how to use Aunt Bertha for your organization, please contact Robin Embick at rembick@camdenhealth.org.