Project New Leaf

Inspiration

People who complete rehabilitative programs in California prisons return at about 21%, compared with about 46% for people who don’t. Yet these programs get less than a tenth of a percent of CDCR’s budget, and nonprofits do most of the work of running them. TPW wants to make a stronger case to legislators and funders that these programs deserve more funding. To do that, it needs consistent impact data from its member organizations, which are busy and need a low-friction way to report it.

To ensure our project wouldn't require additional technical knowledge or expertise, we were inspired to explore existing form input tools. We tried Airtable and Google Forms before deciding on Zite. We kept the data model simple: organizations, programs, prisons, yards, cohorts and a short list of questions. That way, reporting takes a few minutes and the results are easy for TPW to understand and share.

What it does

Project New Leaf is a reporting form and dashboard for TPW.

Member organizations get a guided form for reporting program cohorts. Organization, prison and yard info already exists in the database; they only need to enter cohort details, such as participant count and dates.

On the TPW side, we have an admin view where staff can add, edit or retire cohort questions without code. Retired questions keep their old answers, so past reports still work. The dashboard turns organizations' submissions into numbers TPW can show a legislator or funder.

How we built it

We built New Leaf in Zite, a no-code SaaS platform, using fewer than 15 plain-English AI prompts. Zite's AI agent used the public info from TPW and CIRIS websites to preload all 126 coalition organizations, California’s 31 prisons and 106 yards, so reporting is mostly picking from dropdowns.

The cohort questions live in a table that TPW controls, and the form reads its questions from that table. Validation keeps the data clean: number fields only accept numbers, and required questions can’t be skipped. The dashboard reads directly from submissions, so a new cohort shows up right away.

Challenges we ran into

Since we have the constraint of busy, non-technical users, we decided an existing SaaS platform would be a better fit than a custom-coded app. With Zite, TPW can keep changing the tool with plain-English prompts instead of relying on a developer. Every feature had to be something TPW staff could understand and maintain on their own. TPW can easily change its questions over time without breaking historical reports by unchecking “Active" on a question field, instead of deleting it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We spent a lot of time talking to the TPW organizers and understanding their pain points before starting on our solution. We believe they can start using this project without much additional work after the hackathon.

What we learned

Designing for non-technical users is a different problem. Whether TPW can maintain the tool after we leave matters as much as what the tool can do.

What's next for Project New Leaf

To fully support TPW using this project after the hackathon ends, we'd set up the following:

Instructions and sample prompts for editing the forms and exporting their data (can host on Notion website)
Automated email reminders for organizations to submit the form (monthly or quarterly)