About GGI
At the Global Geospatial Institute, maps are only the beginning. Our nonprofit teaches students how to decipher the planet: how rivers shape a city, how an invasive snail strips a wetland, or why a neighborhood lacks groceries. With Geographic Information Systems—GIS for short—our students learn to thinking spatially, ask sharper questions, and solve problems together.
What we teach
GGI students understand by doing, taking on projects that are rooted in the places they know best. One student, for instance, mapped invasive species in his city.
GIS 101: Introduction to Web GIS – Earn a Microsoft Excel certificate, build digital story maps, and track data in real time.
GIS Entry Level – Learn the building blocks of GIS, from collecting data to analyzing maps that solve real problems.
Drones to Smart Mapping – Take to the air, stitching drone images into accurate, map-like views of local landscapes.
By high school, students can earn an Industry-Based Certification in GIS, a credential that sets them apart in the job market.
GIS isn’t just maps. It’s the foundation of today’s most urgent professions—from rebuilding coasts to planning cities to protecting fragile ecosystems. At GGI, students don’t just prepare for jobs. They prepare to change the future.
OUR MISSIONGlobal Geospatial Institute provides students and teachers with the support they need to learn and apply geospatial technology.
OUR HISTORYFran Harvey, a Louisiana native, discovered Geographic Information Systems (GIS) while studying environmental science and politics. From Katrina’s levees to Gulf Coast wetlands, she used GIS where geography was urgent—storms, oil spills, disappearing coasts. After founding a private GIS firm in 2012, she launched the Global Geospatial Institute, a nonprofit, in 2014 to place these tools in students’ hands. GGI trains teachers and guides students through projects mapping litter, tracing history, and revealing patterns in their own communities. It is less an institute than a bridge—linking science and imagination, the present and the time that will come. More.
OUR IMPACTSince our founding, GGI has reached more than 85,000 students, mostly in Louisiana. Nearly 200 have completed our full program, with many earning industry certification and starting careers in GIS. Even those who pursue other paths carry with them sharper thinking, stronger teamwork, and a new way of understanding the world around them.
From Wonder to Work
Since childhood, Sean Green has been captivated by the quiet dramas of nature—how plants rise and compete, how animals endure. At East St. John High, that fascination took shape when he discovered GIS through the Global Geospatial Institute. With a phone app in hand, he began tracing the paths of invaders: the Chinese tallow tree, overrunning its neighbors, and the apple snail, stripping wetlands bare.
Each point on the map told a larger story—of landscapes in flux, of fragile balances undone. The work sharpened his eye and led him forward, first to an internship with Riverland Surveying, then to a summer job, and now to his studies in environmental science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
For Sean, the maps were more than data. They were doorways—opened by teachers who made the work both accessible and alive.