When people leave prison and re-enter society, the first few days can determine whether they successfully reintegrate or cycle back into the system. For Land Together, an organization in California that supports individuals transitioning back into the community, timing is everything.

But until 2025, their work faced a technical bottleneck: to identify people scheduled for release, staff had to manually comb through the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) website—a process that could take days, and which often left them scrambling to provide support at the last minute.

“We’d find out about a person’s release the day of, or the day before, giving us very little time to prepare, let alone connect with the person before they’re out,” explained Cindi Prado, Reentry Administrative Coordinator at Land Together. “It meant we were playing catch-up when we could have already been supporting someone.”

Furthermore, the CDCR website was updated sporadically, such that by the time staff finished combing through it, their data was sometimes superseded by new information. With Land Together hoping to expand across California to serve more people, they knew their existing approach wouldn’t scale.

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Land Together’s situation reflects a broader challenge many nonprofit organizations face: while the private sector has embraced automation and data analytics, many community-based organizations remain trapped in manual processes that consume precious staff time and limit their impact.

The partnership between Land Together and the Data Science Institute began at a convening hosted by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Family Foundation and the 11th Hour Project. There, Land Together’s team met with data scientists who recognized the challenge of tracking releases as one technology could readily solve.

After working with the Land Together team to understand their workflow and needs, Trevor Spreadbury, a Software Engineer at the DSI, developed an automated web scraping solution that monitors the corrections department website and updates Land Together’s records with the latest data on program participants’ release date and timing. “The script runs automatically every night so each morning they have the most up to date information,” Spreadbury explained, adding, “It was important for the tool to be sustainable long term. From a technical perspective, the script is simple, extremely inexpensive, and has required no maintenance nearly a year in. From an operational perspective, it is incorporated directly into Land Together’s existing systems meaning their staff hasn’t had to learn new tools or worry about remembering some arcane set of steps. It gets that manual work out of the way so they can focus on providing direct support.”

Now, “this scraper has saved so much time and is more accurate than what we did before,” said Prado. “It supports our entire Reentry Team of six people and indirectly benefits our 372 incarcerated participants by helping ensure we have the most up-to-date information available.”

The Land Together partnership illustrates how targeted technical assistance can dramatically amplify a nonprofit’s capacity without requiring them to hire additional staff or develop in-house technical expertise. By automating routine data collection, they can redirect human resources toward their core mission, particularly crucial for volunteer-driven organizations (Land Together was entirely volunteer-run until 2011), where every hour spent on manual data processing is an hour not spent providing direct services. The automated system doesn’t just save time; it enables the organization to be more responsive and proactive in their work: “[We] are now using the updated information in our participants’ files to generate reports about participants who have been found suitable at their parole hearing,” added Prado. “This has been extremely helpful!”

Moreover, as Land Together expands their geographic reach, the technical solution scales with them. What might have required a dedicated team of volunteers and staff to monitor release data across counties can now be handled by updating a script.

“Land Together’s challenge is a frequent one for nonprofits,” said Susan Paykin, Senior Associate Director of Community-Centered Data Science at the DSI. “These organizations often don’t have the same resources as industry, the same IT infrastructure or technical staff. So you have people in direct service spending their limited time on data entry and website monitoring, ancillary tasks that could be automated, instead of the things they’re uniquely able to do. Our hope is that tools like this one can integrate seamlessly into an organization’s workflow, so their team can really adopt it, make it their own, and update it to grow with them.”

The Data Science Institute’s work in Community-Centered Data Science is dedicated to addressing specific community needs in sustainable ways: rather than building complex systems that require ongoing technical maintenance, the focus is on creating tools that organizations can actually use and maintain over time. The approach recognizes that the most elegant technical solution won’t succeed if it doesn’t fit within an organization’s existing workflows and capacity. 

Learn more about the DSI’s collaborations with 11th Hour Project grantees as the centralized hub for software and data science here.

Land Together staff and volunteers at a prison farmers market, part of the organization’s broader mission to support individuals impacted by incarceration. Their reentry program helps people transition back into the community with the same dignity and support reflected in all their work. Photo courtesy of Land Together.