Coalesce 2024: Food + data for better lives: Modernizing the Houston Food Bank's data stack with dbt
Over the last 2+ years, HFB has leveraged dbt to modernize our data stack. Initially working with dbt Core, our data team's engineers centralized, streamlined, and automated data pipelines to provide critical KPIs to HFB Leadership.
The Houston Food Bank (HFB) is the largest food bank in the country, serving 18 southeast Texas counties and distributing over 120 million meals in the last fiscal year through our network of 1,600+ community partners to the 1 million-plus food-insecure persons in the region.
Over the last 2+ years, HFB has leveraged dbt to modernize our data stack. Initially working with dbt Core, our data team's engineers centralized, streamlined, and automated data pipelines to provide critical KPIs to HFB Leadership. Fast-forward to today, our data team of 10, which includes engineers, analysts, and other specialists, uses dbt Cloud to manage all data transformations in our data warehouse, which now supports 30+ integrations and 70+ reports that deliver 180+ metrics to stakeholders across the organization. This organizational transformation has saved countless hours for our staff, improved organizational trust in data significantly by identifying and managing sources of truth, and delivered key insights to stakeholders across our entire organization. A handful of examples include:
- Identifying corporate donor opportunities by mining donor and volunteer data
- Increasing the number of opportunities for federal and grant-based funding by being able to generate metrics across an ever-increasing number of data sources
- Assessing the efficiency of school-based programs by analyzing the proportion and volume of students served to the food-insecure population of that school
HFB is committed to being a data leader in the food banking space, and we’re hoping our journey using dbt can inspire other non-profits to leverage the platform as well.
Speakers:
Erwin Kristel, Data Analyst @ Houston Food Bank
Benjamin Herndon-Miller, Data Engineer @ Houston Food Bank
Susan Quiros, Data Analyst II @ Houston Food Bank