Food banks run by charitable organizations are a public service where private entities fill in where government runs short. Picking up, storing, and sharing food throws lifelines to those in need. I volunteered to create updated maps for Scouting America and decided to use QGis and related software tools.
(1) OSM
Going from the lowest level up, I added OpenStreetMaps (OSM). This is an easy drag-and-drop from the base QGIS sources into the current project. Depending on the desired result, I change the transparency from none to 50% more or less.
The standard OSM layer sources from openstreetmap.org. I've found, using tools like Viking, that variations on the main source can be used, and I prefer to try the Humanitarian one. Eventually I found the wiki page which let me set the feed, like this:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Raster_tile_providers
https://a.tile.openstreetmap.fr/hot/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
(2) Org
The second layer is the organization table. These have street addresses in the source, so I geo-located them with a Census Bureau tool that works via command line.
Once located, the QGIS data are converted to geometry. In a PostgreSQL database, I imported organization details, which had only street addresses not geo-data. To convert from the address to a lat/lon point I found a Census page that I could script.
Ran the conversion steps and viewed points and polygons. Once the latitude and longitude are set, the PostGIS function to make this into valid point(s) I used is:
UPDATE org.org SET geom = ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(lng, lat), 4326);
(3) Tract shapes
Next level layer shows US Census tracts. I found a couple sources of these shape files, and used the Maryland State data.
https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/index.php?year=2020&layergroup=Census+Tracts
