Inspiration California spends less than 1% of its corrections budget on rehabilitation, yet over 95% of incarcerated individuals eventually re-enter society. Transformative Programming Works (TPW) serves as the unified voice for over 120 community-based organizations (CBOs) providing healing, educational, and restorative justice programs inside state prisons.

Despite doing life-changing work, these nonprofits face a structural wall: they can easily prove activity (hours taught, enrollments, completions), but they cannot prove outcomes (reduced recidivism, post-release stability). The necessary data exists inside disconnected state agencies like CDCR, parole boards, and justice databases, but it has never been unified. We were inspired to build a bridge between these disparate data silos, empowering TPW and its NPO network with the tangible evidence needed to secure funding, influence policy, and scale rehabilitative justice statewide.

What it does Our project is a unified data integration and visualization framework that transforms fragmented prison program records fron NPOs into actionable, advocacy-ready insights:

In-website form to for CBOs to log their program attendance.
Show data in clear, interactive visual analytics that showcase quarterly impact across 120+ member organizations
Report Generation: Generates NPO specific reports that ban be used for grantor, volunteer, and gov't communication

How we built it We cloned the TPW official website (thetpw.org) so that this could eventually be added to their website. We used HTML to build custom form for ease of entry since this CBO program staff are often busy and dashboard data visualzations. We used Google's App Script to put the output of the forms into Google Sheets, a platform already adopted by the TPW staff.

Challenges we ran into: The NPOs and TPW stakeholders are of varying sizes and maturity, so we had to think about an intuitive data collection and visualization method that would provide value to the different organizations. We also assumed that the different NPOs would have different levels of data standardization and are not used to this type of centralized data collection process. We hope our choice of google sheets will be an intutive tech stack for our nonprofit partners.

Metric Standardization: Translating varied qualitative and quantitative metrics from over 120 distinct CBOs (ranging from creative arts to vocational training) into a cohesive, standardized impact framework.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We're proud of a solution that is intuitive to our nonprofit partners and to TPW, and that is also lightweight and maintainable.

What we learned The treatment delivery of rehabilitation programs is done by a variety of different types and sizes of NPOs and CBOs. We also learn about the importance of these rehabilitation programs within the general prison industrial framework The Power of Coalition Data: Aggregating data across 120+ small CBOs turns fragmented local stories into a powerful, statewide collective narrative that cannot be ignored.

What's next for Transforming TPW ✨ Helping to develop a communication strategy and integrating our solution into their website, and trying to get the first server request launched by mid-November

This will enable the productionizing of our the local prototype so all 120+ CBOs under the TPW. They will be able to log in, upload their own operational data, and instantly export tailored impact reports for their individual grant applications.