The Project
Initially, as a response to the war in Ukraine, the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants was motivated to assist with humanitarian relief efforts for new Ukrainian immigrants. OCASI reached out to Kalamuna to help develop a custom marketplace that could log both corporate and public donation offers to recipients. The platform aimed to migrate donation intake and distribution processes into a centralized, scalable platform to quickly and efficiently get housing donations to agencies and, therefore, newcomers.
Our collaboration was characterized by well-managed communications and collaborative workshops. OCASI’s Product Owner was well-integrated with our development team, facilitating efficient decision-making. Following this program's first iteration, our partnership with OCASI continues to grow while the platform improves in response to community interest and program evolution.
The Big Goal
The public and corporations want to donate money, housing, employment, and more to immigrants in need. Depending on the type of donation, these offers are routed to a given region to evaluate and process. This routing may include delivery via automated email or may include settlement workers logging into a “donation marketplace” to process the donation match. An online processing application to match donations with needs identified by settlement sector case managers was desired to help facilitate the transfer of goods and services. While this platform was initially developed to address Ukrainian refugee needs, today its use has broadened to address the needs of additional groups, and the model has ambition to extend beyond Ontario to apply to other Canadian provinces.
We developed custom Drupal entities to streamline the donation process for the user while capturing essential statistics about how donations move through the system. We created a base donation entity type, which was extended for each donation type, like housing opportunities. We included the address, amenities provided, leasing requirements, and availability date for housing posts. Other donations, such as clothing or gift card donations, will require different information to be captured. By structuring the donation data in custom entities, we were better able to support OCASI’s management and tracking of donations and future growth to include other donation types.
A key goal for this project was to create an effective matchmaking system that connected donations directly with the support agencies most able to deliver them to individuals in need. We built a donation marketplace where moderated donations could be claimed by agencies working with newcomers. This marketplace allowed settlement workers to find and allocate resources to the people who needed them most.
We designed automated workflows within Drupal that allow OCASI to moderate donations before making them available on the marketplace. Each step in the workflow includes helpful prompts and instructions, and email notifications. This automation speeds up the overall donation process, reducing workload on OCASI staff who can instead focus on more direct support for newcomers.
Final Thoughts
A flexible and robust infrastructure ensures the platform can evolve in response to emerging needs. This forward-thinking approach positions the platform as a valuable tool for OCASI and other organizations in their ongoing efforts to support immigrants and refugees across Canada and positions them to respond quickly to a future humanitarian crisis.
Kalamuna just makes really great looking things that work well. They helped us to simplify many of our sites, both for the visitor and the staff supporting it.
John Gilliam
Senior Manager, IT and Digital Services at OCASI