CASA Project & Organization Overview

CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) is a role fulfilled by a trained volunteer sworn into a county-level juvenile dependency court system to advocate on behalf of a youth in the corresponding county's foster care system. CASA is also the namesake role of the national organization, CASA, which exists to cultivate and supervise volunteers carrying out this work – with county level chapters (operating relatively independently of each other) across the country.

PG CASA (Prince George's County CASA in Maryland) seeks a volunteer management system to:

• provide volunteers with a portal for logging activity
• oversee volunteer activity
• generate reports on volunteer activity 11 How CASA works:
• Foster Youth (or case worker associated with Foster Youth) requests a CASA Volunteer.
• CASA chapter pairs Youth with Volunteer.
• Volunteer spends significant time getting to know and supporting the youth, including at court appearances.
• Case Supervisor oversees CASA Volunteer paired with Foster Youth and monitors, tracks, and advises on all related activities.
• At PG CASA, the minimum volunteer commitment is one year (this varies by CASA chapter, in San Francisco the minimum commitment is ~ two years). Many CASA volunteers remain in a Youth's life well beyond their youth. The lifecycle of a volunteer is very long, so there's a lot of activity for chapters to track!

Why? Many adults circulate in and out of a Foster Youth's life, but very few of them (if any) remain. CASA volunteers are by design, unpaid, unbiased, and consistent adult figures for Foster Youth who are not bound to support them by fiscal or legal requirements.

Project Terminology

• Foster Youth = CasaCase
• CASA Volunteer = Volunteer
• Case Supervisor = Case Supervisor
• CASA Administrator = Superadmin

Project Considerations

• PG CASA is operating under a very tight budget. They currently manually input volunteer data into a volunteer management software built specifically for CASA, but upgrading their account for multiple user licenses to allow volunteers to self-log activity data is beyond their budget. Hence why we are building as lightweight a solution as possible that can sustain itself on Microsoft Azure nonprofit credits for hosting (totalling $3,500 annually).
• While the scope of this platform's use is currently only for PG County CASA, we are building with a mind toward multitenancy so this platform could prospectively be used by CASA chapters across the country. We consider PG CASA an early beta tester of this platform.

More information:

Learn more about PG CASA here.

You can read the complete role description of a CASA volunteer in Prince George's County as well.

Want to contribute? Great!

Here is our contributing guide!

Staging Environment on Heroku

https://casa-r4g-staging.herokuapp.com/

Error tracking

We are currently using https://app.bugsnag.com/ to track errors in staging. Errors post to slack at #casa-bots

Email

This app sends email for user signup and deactivation. We use https://www.sendinblue.com/ because we get 300 free emails a day, which is more than we expect to need. Sendinblue has historically sometimes been very slow (6 hours) in delivering email, but sometimes it delivers within a minute or two. Be wary. You log into sendinblue via the "log in with google" option. Sean has the credentials for this and hopefully we never need to change them. We are not using Mailgun because they limited us to only 5 recipients without a paid plan. We looked at using Sendgrid but our account is currently locked for unknown reasons.

Hosting

Namecheap, heroku

Setup to develop:

If you have any troubles, also look at .travis.yml which is what makes the CI build run

1. git clone the repo (fork it if you don't have repo permissions yet)
2. cd casa/
3. install a ruby version manager: rvm or rbenv
4. when you cd into the project directory, let your version manager install the ruby version in .ruby-version
5. gem install bundler
6. bundle install
7. Make sure that postgres is installed brew install postgres OR brew postgresql-upgrade-database (if you have an older version of postgres). If you're on Ubuntu/WSL, use sudo apt-get install libpq-dev so the gem can install. Use the Postgres repo for Ubuntu or WSL to get the server and client tools.
8. bundle exec rails db:setup # requires running local postgres, with a role created for whatever user you're running rails as
9. Make sure nvm is installed
10. Make sure you have google chrome installed so the selenium tests can run. Installing chromium-browser is enough, even in WSL.
11. Make sure yarn is installed. On Ubuntu, make sure you install it from the official Yarn repo instead of cmdtest.
12. yarn
13. bundle exec rails webpacker:compile
14. bundle exec rails spec
15. bundle exec rails server # run server
16. bundle exec standardrb --fix # auto-fix linting issues (optional) more linter info
17. bundle exec erblint --lint-all --autocorrect Optional ERB linter (there are currently lots of errors)

Documentation

There is a doc directory at the top level that includes Architectural Decision Records and entity relationship diagram of various models.

Common issues

1. If your rake/rake commands hang forever instead of running, try: rails app:update:bin
2. There is currently no option for a user to sign up and create an account through the UI. This is intentional. If you want to log in, use a pre-seeded user account and its credentials.
3. If you are on windows and see the error "Requirements support for mingw is not implemented yet" then use https://rubyinstaller.org/ instead

Ubuntu and WSL

1. If you are on Ubuntu in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and rbenv install indicates that the Ruby version is unavailable, you might be using Ubuntu's default install of ruby-build, which only comes with old installs of Ruby (ending before 2.6.) You should uninstall rvm and ruby-build's apt packages (apt remove rvm ruby-build) and install them with Git like this: git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc exec $SHELL git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git "$(rbenv root)"/plugins/ruby-build

You'll probably hit a problem where ruby-version reads ruby-2.7.1 but the install available to you is called 2.7.1. If you do, install rbenv-alias and create an alias between the two.

Testing

Test credentials for https://casa-r4g-staging.herokuapp.com/

1. [email protected]
/ 123456
2. [email protected]
/ 123456
3. [email protected]
/ 123456

Test coverage

Test coverage is run by simplecov on all builds and aggregated by CodeClimate

Communication and Collaboration

Most conversation happens in the #casa channel of the Ruby For Good slack. You can get access here: https://rubyforgood.herokuapp.com/

You can also open an issue or comment on an issue on github and a maintainer will reply to you.

We have a weekly team call on Sunday at (new time TBD - check slack) where we do pair/mob programming and talk about issues- feel free to join! Join info in slack or open a github issue to request join info

We have a weekly stakeholder call with PG CASA staff on Wednesday at 8:30am Pacific time where we show off progress and discuss launch plans. Feel free to join! Join info in slack or open a github issue to request join info

History

First CASA supervisor training: 12 August 2020 🎉