Community is essential to Cartisan and our cartographers. With community being about relationships, we value the business relations we establish with clients and suppliers, the bonds within Cartisan, and the ties with cartographers from other map production firms. Indeed, the relationships that we form by living in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington, DC are important to us, as are our global connections and footprints. Therefore, it is integral to Cartisan to embrace our communities within our operations.

As part of this, we strive to develop mapping and informational products that stand to directly benefit our communities outside the realm of business and profit. We have developed pro bono projects, such as creating cartographic, GIS and demographic analysis to elucidate community questions involving Stoddert Park’s proposed recreation center, to GIS, map production, and aid map distribution assistance with the Hurricane Katrina and Rita recovery effort.

Our scope is much larger yet, due to the exposure Chief Cartographer Brody Dittemore had while producing maps in the US Gulf States following Hurricane Katrina. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita exposed substantial challenges to the ability of a developed country, with all of its wealth and resources, in dealing with large internal disaster and humanitarian scenarios. There were major failures at all levels of communities and governments, including inappropriate solutions and inadequate information dissemination.

In order to improve disaster preparedness and responsiveness within the US, Brody has sought hands-on exposure developing mapping and information system solutions in regions that face disasters and humanitarian crises at higher frequencies. After the hurricanes, Brody took his map making and GIS skills to Pakistan, which had just been stricken with an intense earthquake that killed, wounded and displaced millions of people who were then ill-prepared to face an impending harsh Himalayan winter. Then he went to the wartime quagmire of Iraq, and while producing maps also developed database solutions. After the Middle East, Brody is now in East Africa, a region that often confronts droughts, famines, civil war, environmental degradation, and demographic challenges.

Through the experience Brody has gained working with a variety of organizations, including the United Nations, USAID, and small NGOs, Cartisan is preparing to make a substantial difference when our communities face difficult challenges and obstacles.

From New Orleans to Nairobi, one thing has been common in all the development and recovery projects: the need for strong, functional maps, rapid GIS deployment, integrated information systems, and the ability to put helpful maps in the hands of populations that need them. If this cannot be done, project operations become blind and plans unravel.

These are projects that Cartisan Maps knows it cannot undertake alone. If you’d like to help, or if you have a suggestion for a map or information system project that needs our assistance, please contact us at maps@cartisan.com.