California Birth Equity Connect

The California Birth Equity Connect is a platform built for the California Coalition for Black Birth Justice, mapping the organizations and the policy working on Black birth equity across California. It comes in three parts: a dashboard, a directory of organizations and a policy tracker. The site is designed throughout in the Coalition's own branding.

The dashboard map divides California into a grid of over a hundred cells, each shaded by how many organizations serve the area it covers. The measure is coverage rather than where an office sits. Beside the map are four panels of attributes: type of organization, organizational approach, people served by gender and age, and people served by race and ethnicity. Each panel carries a plain-language question, and each attribute within it a count of the organizations that match. Clicking one filters the map and rewrites its title.

Each of the four categories has its own color, carried through the site so a tag reads the same way on a dashboard panel and on an organization page. Hovering a grid cell gives the number of organizations there and a breakdown of the areas they cover. Clicking it lists them, and each listing opens that organization's own page.

The organizations section is a list view with a fuller set of filters, for anyone who would rather work from a list than a map. Each organization has a page carrying its description, region, approach, form, the populations it serves and a link to its own site, with a Report Correction control on every one.

The policy tracker is filterable by type, focus area, year, whether a policy is national, and current status. Each entry carries a short summary and links out to the record. The tracker is stamped with its own last updated date.

The application is built on Next.js and Payload CMS with Vercel Postgres and Blob storage, using Mapbox GL for the map and Chakra UI for the interface, behind accounts with role-based permissions. Content is edited through Payload's Lexical editor, so Coalition staff maintain the organization records, the policy entries and the site copy directly.