My JumpVault is an intuitive, youth-envisioned web application developed by Five Points Technology Group (Five Points), under the direction of a group of young adults in the Florida foster care system.
Five Points designed My JumpVault as a tool to help foster youth develop a stable foundation for their “jump" to adulthood by providing an easily accessible location to upload, store, and manage the vital information life requires—from important health, education, and employment documentation; to helpful resources, tips, and reminders; to photographs and other precious memories—all via a secure web site.
In this age of social marketing and youth constantly on the move, we also wanted My JumpVault to be fun and easy to use. We gave My JumpVault a current web site feel, made it accessible from a PC, Laptop, tablet ,or smart phone, and added the ability to upload photographs, enter and track calendar events, and change page background and font colors. Just like uploading images to a social media site, information and images can be scanned or photographed, uploaded, and accessed quickly and securely by the youth or assigned workers from with Internet capability.
What’s Inside My JumpVault? From the Dashboard screen, users can access 13 additional screens—from My Education and My Employment, to My Health and My Housing. Each section includes a progress bar, helpful prompts, forms and documents, and links to resources other foster youth have found helpful in that area.
My JumpVault was designed by foster youth for foster youth. It was created to be both fun and easy to use—but also to provide value to these users. Here is what youth are saying about the solution—how it is helping them, or could have helped in a variety of situations.
Five Points designed My JumpVault with Big Bend Community Based Care, a private non-profit organization in Florida that provides solutions to improve child welfare in the community. The solution has been very successful with CBC's statewide.
A group of young adults from the Florida foster care system, in collaboration with Big Bend Community Based Care (BBCBC), envisioned a secure online “vault" to store critical documents and other pertinet information, provide guides to life skills and offer links to local resources. These young adults identified barriers to independence, raising the team’s awareness about lack of access to resources and critical documents necessary to advance from dependency to an independent adulthood. Further, the young designers a expressed desire to have a secure, permanent place to call their own, a place consistent with the lifestyle of today’s mobile, yet connected youth-aresource to provide them an equal shot at life.
My JumpVault is a secure, online repository requiring only a browser to access from your PC, laptop, tablet, or smart phone. While not a social network, My JumpVault works in a similar, familiar manner. Youth or case workers (until desired age) can check status from anywhere, upload a scanned document or PDF file, and even take and upload a photo right from a smart phone. The system also offers a subscription to a “service in the cloud" feature that includes help desk and technical support.
Security is our top priority. The “vault" concept originated from a significant and valid concern youth in foster care had over privacy and security. Our web site is housed in a secure, HIPAA-compliant data center and maintained with the same security used by financial institutions and the Federal Government. Additional measures are implemented within the system infrastructure to provide higher security for highly confidential documents, such as protected health information (PHI). Passwords, encryption, and a fast “time-out" feature provide additional security and protect data both in the vault and in transmission.
Accessible online via a user experience already familiar to young people today, My JumpVault offers access to foster youths’ important documents, valuable resources, and even precious memories—all in a secure repository. Reminders can be set so important things that need uploading are not forgotten, and status bars allow a youth to monitor progress and goals in the system. Youth can keep track of court dates and other calendar events, access resources such as resume writing tips with a click, read up on his or her rights, track his or her education, and communicate with case workers. By successfully supporting and shortening the transition to independence, My JumpVault provides a valuable return on investment (ROI), freeing resources to support additional youth and expand programs.