Placemaker

Inspiration

With modern technology, no shelter bed should go unused.

What it does

It solves three problems in the "Emergency Shelter" category:

The recently homeless on the streets don't know where to go.

Using a simple mobile interface, Placemaker makes it easy for shelter caseworkers to reach out to those that could be in need.

Client intake is processing using an archaic system.

Once a client arrives at the shelter, Placemaker's one-step check in makes labor-intensive intake a thing of the past.

Caseworkers at emergency shelters don't know where to direct clients they can't provide with a bed.

Placemaker also makes it easy for caseworkers to find open beds in other shelters for clients they cannot help. Our goal was to build a system that anyone with a phone could use, creating a low barrier to adoption.

How we built it

We built a extendable, robust back-end Flask-based API that is easy to use. We used a MongoDB database because it is schema-less and scalable.
On the user end, we created a sleek mobile/web Ionic application running NodeJs for superlative speed and usable by any device.

Challenges we ran into

Two main problems: 1. We didn't read the challenge problems closely enough, so we went wrong in some directions at the beginning. 2. We bit off more than we could chew

    More from enthusiasm than hubris, our dreams got the best of us during the first third of the challenge, and it cost us some valuable time. Reality quickly set in, and we set to work on achievable goals.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a flexible and extendable API that allows us to create CoC, member organization and client profiles, track member clients, build custom forms, search the organization profiles, and text message clients. It is also HUD compliant and you can import data directly into the system. This system requires very little external maintenance and is extremely cheap. It is available to anyone with a feature phone.

What we learned

Homelessness is a complex problem, but there are simple systems that we can build to make the lives of the homeless better.

What's next for Placemaker

Instead of a push-notification system as a solution for the first problem, we want to develop an on-demand, need-matching service. To get support, a client would tape the "home" button on the app and the system would send an alert to the shelters that 1) serve their demographics and 2) still have vacancies. Alerts would be fed directly to each shelter's Placemaker dashboard (and sent directly as texts to teach shelter's caseworker), and, from that dashboard, caseworkers could "claim" an alert. A "claim" would remove the alert from the Placemaker dashboards of the admins that didn't respond in time. The claim is resolved when clients "check-in" to the shelter that claimed the case

Automatic cold weather notifications, admin data visualization, and predictive analytics are all areas where it would be easy for us to build on our current platform.