Bloom

Inspiration

For women in shelters, safety is not the same as wellbeing. Education is rarely the bottleneck—these women know what supports their wellness. The real issue is that they face immense structural barriers, like a lack of privacy, limited resources, and daily cognitive overload. Standard wellness apps implicitly assume users have personal phones, private spaces, and stable routines. We were inspired to bridge this gap by designing a solution rooted in the actual realities of shelter life, recognizing that true resilience requires feeding the interconnected aspects of the mind, body, and soul.

What it does

Bloom is a zero-onboarding, accessible wellness platform designed for shared shelter devices (like front-desk tablets) and mobile phones. It provides frictionless support for both residents and staff through a holistic lens:

Feeding the Mind: Guided breathing and grounding exercises, and a multilingual AI chatbot (supporting voice and text) provides anonymous, low-stigma emotional support.
Feeding the Body: A resource-aware recipe maker that generates actionable meals based on limited pantry ingredients and dietary restrictions. We also included a curated series of physical exercises designed for crowded, shared spaces.
Feeding the Soul: An identity hub that helps women reconnect with their roots by allowing them to select their home country or faith to instantly access culturally relevant news, proverbs, or spiritual texts. We also included a doodling canvas for free expression.

Secondary Supports:

A "Kids Corner" with printable stories and coloring pages helps alleviate childcare stress.
A comprehensive Resource Hub connecting women to housing, legal, and safety contacts.

For the Staff:

The "Living Garden" dashboard provides a visual representation of shelter engagement, tracking anonymous activity logs and high-traffic times so staff can see what resources are working without violating resident privacy.

How we built it

We built Bloom as a shared wellness platform with two clients on top of one backend: an Android app built in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose for the mobile sanctuary experience, and a Next.js web app on Vercel for residents, shelter tablets, and staff dashboards. Both connect to the same Supabase backend for authentication, synced activity data, flowers, shelters, and resident/staff views, while the web app uses Next.js route handlers for server-side features like AI chat and content fetching. On the mobile side, we also added offline-friendly local storage with Room and bundled JSON assets so key parts of the experience can still work even when connectivity is limited.

Challenges we ran into

Designing for the structural realities of shelter life was our biggest hurdle. We had to unlearn standard app mechanics—removing user accounts, login screens, and onboarding completely to minimize friction and ensure total privacy. Another major challenge was building a truly accessible tool that serves diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds without making assumptions about digital literacy.

One of the biggest technical challenges was keeping the web and Android experiences functionally aligned while they used different UI stacks and slightly different execution models. We had to carefully sync shared flows like sanctuary activities, chat, tablet logging, and staff analytics through the same Supabase schema without breaking offline support on Android or server/client boundaries on the web. Other challenges included multilingual support, voice input differences between browser and Android, embedding media safely in shelter environments, and designing around privacy and shared-device use so residents could still access support without needing a full personal login.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of building a comprehensive ecosystem that respects the interconnectedness of wellbeing by successfully expanding features across all three core categories: mind, body, and soul. We translated complex, systemic barriers into thoughtful, simple design features, most notably by developing dual interfaces for both residents and staff. A major accomplishment was bridging the gap between these two views. We managed to allow optional user accounts for residents to ensure total privacy, while still providing shelter staff with actionable data analytics through our 'Living Garden' dashboard. Finally, to ensure the app is truly accessible for women from all walks of life, we have made the entire platform fully multilingual, ensuring language is never a barrier to receiving support.

What we learned

We learned that in marginalized communities, the barriers to wellness are rarely informational; they are structural. Designing this project taught us how to build with deep empathy, prioritizing physical constraints and emotional bandwidth over flashy features. Most importantly, we realized that a truly holistic solution doesn't just focus on the end-user. Empowering the staff who support these women is just as critical.

What's next for Bloom

Our immediate next step is to pilot Bloom with local community partners like CWI to gather real-world feedback from both shelter residents and staff. From there, we want to expand our language support, add deeper culturally specific resources to the "Soul" pillar, and enhance the "Living Garden" analytics. Ultimately, our vision is to open-source Bloom so shelters everywhere can easily deploy and customize this ecosystem for their unique communities.

To access the staff view: Username: admin@bloom.dev Password: bloom2026

then access resident view via the "Shelter Tablet" tab