“In order to take action, we need to know what’s happening and where gaps exist.” - World Central Kitchen
Chef Jose Andres’ organization World Central Kitchen is organizing restaurants, chefs, and kitchens to safely distribute healthy, fresh meals across the country to those in need due to the COVID-19 epidemic.
Their nationwide Chefs for America map is built from crowd-sourced data displaying available meals at three types of locations: School districts, restaurants, and World Central Kitchen community kitchens and meal distribution points.
The Chefs for America Map displays available meals and links to additional information for school districts, restaurants, and WCK kitchens.
How to help
- If you are a restaurant supporting your community add your information here.
- Is your school district not listed on the map? Add it here.
- Want to join #ChefsForAmerica Community Kitchen effort? Fill out this form!
Building a map from a simple spreadsheet
World Central Kitchen is managing a growing list of multiple types of crowd-sourced data, so Mapbox volunteers helped them deploy a lightweight solution that allowed their distributed team to update and access the data from a simple, collaborative Google spreadsheet.
We started with our new Sheet Mapper tool, which provides the template code and architecture to create and publish a live-updating, custom web map from a simple list of locations and coordinates.
Chefs For America map data
To build your own, follow the step-by-step guide which walk through the full process from data gathering to publishing, with minimal coding. The template data maps local food banks, but this solution is useful for anyone wanting to map a set of locations — to show offices, program sites, events, and more.
Once you’ve started with the basic setup you can add more advanced functionality. World Central Kitchen’s map uses a client-side data join to match the spreadsheet data to a tileset with the shapes and location of each school district. Another partner, the 50 States Project uses this solution as a road trip mapper with an added call to the Search API to geocode the addresses and the Directions API to calculate their route. Other organizations have added a step for caching data from the spreadsheet in AWS S3 buckets to improve map performance when there are thousands of points to display.
Check out the Sheet Mapper tool and reach out to the Community team if you need support for COVID-19 or other social impact projects.
