HARRT x Notewell: What happens in Montana doesn’t stay in Montana

Our team was founded earlier this year to empower caseworkers with an intelligent tool that automates the tedium of paperwork. The social service sector is where some of the most important and overlooked work happens in our communities, and we are so excited for Notewell to support those who are serving the most vulnerable among us. Join us along our journey!

The 1,000 mile journey and the 10,000 mile journey

At the start of August, the Notewell team packed their bags and drove across four states, over 1,000 miles, from San Francisco, California, to Helena, Montana to onboard one of Notewell’s first customers, a non-profit called the Helena Area Refugee Resettlement Team (HARRT). In partnership with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), HARRT was about to welcome a Congolese family from the Nyarugusu refugee camp in northwestern Tanzania.

Having fled their home in the DRC due to conflict, this family arrived at the Nyarugusu camp in 1999 - a mother with three sons in tow. Over the next twenty-five years, two sons would die and one would find love, marry, and raise seven children within the camp. They received asylum this year, having waited eighteen years for approval, and would now fly 10,000 miles from Tanzania to Montana, their new and wildly exotic home.

With ten family members and another on the way, this would be the largest family HARRT has ever welcomed. This was a great opportunity to see what Notewell could do: onboarding this new family into HARRT’s case management system. This was not only the ultimate stress test for our product, but a deeply meaningful and humanizing experience for our team.

A little backstory  

Through the US Refugee Admissions Program, the Biden administration is on track to allow 125,000 refugees to find safe haven in the US this year. While the refugee program has historically received strong bipartisan support, President Trump limited refugee admissions to record lows during his tenure, averaging 64,000 refugees a year, and has stated he would suspend the program again if he is re-elected.

This push to resettle a record number of refugees before the November elections, especially as conflict and upheaval displaces 1.5% of the global population, means that there is an urgent need for organizations like HARRT and the IRC to build capacity to help new arrivals settle into their new communities.

Working with the US government, the IRC resettles refugees from around the word, and HARRT is the first local organization that they have ever partnered with. HARRT is well-respected for their experience, having resettled and built a community around many refugees within Montana over the past decade.

Valerie Hellerman, the co-founder of HARRT and a formidable whirlwind of energy, compassion, and decades of humanitarian experience, invited our team to shadow HARRT (as in VIP backstage HIPAA-compliant access passes). We sat in on their meetings with the IRC as well as with their day-to-day activities preparing for the family’s arrival, organizing the community to pull together resources, and receiving the family at the airport with great anticipation and hand-written Karibu (Swahili for Welcome) signs. This allowed us to understand exactly how Notewell could be useful, and where it could integrate into HARRT’s work in real time.

Problem: The Chaos

Within twenty-four hours of a family’s arrival, the IRC requires that caseworkers conduct what is called a 24-hour check-in meeting, which covers everything from safety checklists to conversations about health concerns, education levels, housing, gender norms in America, and the need for every able adult to find work as soon as possible.

An hour into the conversation, the caseworkers had just figured out how many months pregnant the mother was, and that the family’s arrival had been delayed a week because one of their children had to recover from pneumonia. And that was just the conversation about health concerns.  

The family, on the other hand, had just figured out that they could drink tap water here without dying of dysentery, and how to cook without fire (on an electric stove). They still had to figure out the microwave, the thirty-below-zero winter that was coming, and the 9-5 M-F 40-hour American workweek.

The chaos was palpable such that by the end of the 2+ hour-long check in, both the family and the caseworkers were completely zonked, and the main (and possibly only) thing that was clear was the problem Notewell needed to solve: the very first thing on the caseworkers’ minds was the well-being of the new family and how to support them as they made the monumental leap to life in Montana, and the very last thing on their minds was taking notes and doing the paperwork that would be required for reporting, bookkeeping, grant-writing, etc.

This problem could be broken down into three parts:

1. The sheer amount of things to keep track of across this family of 10 people.
2. The inability for caseworkers to both focus fully on clients and take useful notes at the same time. In Valerie’s words, “Refugee resettlement work takes so much face to face interaction, and having to go home after and write notes is just crazy.”
3. Sometimes there would be a lack of consensus and coordination because every caseworker took their own version of notes on their own notepads or devices

Solution: How Notewell manages the chaos, no matter how chaotic

Notewell records meetings with clients and keeps track of anything that the caseworker asks it to. Below are examples of questions that a caseworker can ask Notewell to keep track of as they focus on dialoguing and being present to their client’s needs in the moment:

We put a great deal of effort into making sure Notewell is intuitive and easy to use, so a large chunk of our time in Helena was spent building new features and reorienting elements, in direct response to feedback from HARRT in real time.

With the press of a button, Notewell processes a meeting in a couple minutes, automatically filling out any necessary information - whether that’s filling a form for the IRC or keeping track of their clients for their own records. All the caseworker needs to do is to review the notes that Notewell generated. As Valerie said, “Review not write. That’s what I want to be able to do.” With Notewell Valerie's team can:

1. Capture thorough notes on all the key topics of concern that arose, whether it was health conditions, legal status, educational levels, or any unanticipated concerns that arose, with minimal effort. The notes are displayed as a timeline per client so the case worker can track clients over time.‍
2. Run in the background so that caseworkers can focus on clients’ needs knowing that Notewell is there to capture the information they need. We looked at the caseworkers’ notes post-meeting and they were sparse because the caseworkers were rightfully focused on their clients. Without Notewell, after a long and emotionally demanding day, the caseworker would have to fill out forms using a smattering of notes and what information they can recall, before being inundated again at the next meeting. ‍
3. Provide comprehensive, unbiased notes as a common reference point across caseworkers who are managing the same case or for program decisions and action items from internal organizational meetings so that everyone can be on the same page.

Impact: What happens in Montana doesn’t stay in Montana

It was thrilling to witness our product empower such meaningful work. Equipping HARRT’s team so they could focus on what really mattered—empowering this family’s new life in Montana—was a clear reminder of why we created Notewell in the first place.

We are inspired to scale that impact across many organizations, and continue to improve how Notewell can serve their needs. It is an honor to bring this level of support to those who are doing such important work.

Two weeks after our team returned to California, we followed up with HARRT to see how we can continue to support them. We learned they are receiving an Afghan family next week, and likely another Afghan family and Congolese family before the end of the year.

Valerie shared that HARRT has continued to use Notewell and how it’s been catching information that would have fallen through the cracks otherwise. As they are already eyeball deep in helping the recent family find employment, buy winter clothes, and enroll in school, and now also finding housing in preparation for the new Afghan family, she emphasized how she feels peace-of-mind knowing she can rely on Notewell as well as our team :)

If you are an organization looking for this level of support through your day-to-day needs as well as your strategic goals, please reach out to us at team@notewell.ai. We’d love to chat with you!

Written by Melanie Chan & Julien Hoachuck