2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Recent statistics has shown that nonprofit organizations are considered the third largest workforce in the United States after retail and manufacturing. Unfortunately, unlike retail and manufacturing, the lack of financial support and in-house expertise has resulted in many nonprofits falling short of technology advancement including proper custom software solutions. The lack of the technology support leads to wide performance gaps that can result in ineffective management and communication, uninspired donor base, and lack of data driven decision making.

The engineering program at Houston Christian University has adopted a Project Based Service/Community Learning model through a series of carefully designed project-based curriculum embedded with the SAFE (Securing America’s Future through Engineering) Cyber Labs. In our efforts to bring this acronym to practice, we worked on partnering with non-profit organizations to help them bridge the technology gaps they face while giving our students the opportunities to work on designing and building solutions for real-world problems.

Our first successful academia-nonprofit collaboration stemmed from our outreach to Crime Stoppers of Houston. On weekly basis, they perform manual data retrieval for thousands of data points collected from county court criminal records, local police reports, district attorney offices, tip lines and other sources. The data size and scope were overwhelming to process manually to extract meaningful analytics of the crime patterns. By integrating this project within our Computer Science capstone courses, internships and few other courses, our students through full-stack web development were able to help with the launch of Crime Stoppers Data Analytics Research Center website that tracks crime trends and related data making it available to the community and law enforcements. In this paper, we share our experiences with this collaboration, success initiatives as well as lessons learned that led to similar ongoing collaborations with other non-profit organizations within the greater Houston community.