Inspiration

Homelessness is complex issue that directly affects thousands of members of our community in Colorado Springs. The resources are very limited for addressing shelter needs and little technological innovation is directed towards these communities that don't provide profit incentives. Our project hopes to streamline shelter management for social workers allowing them to spend more time on face to face support. Additionally our project hopes to make it easier for unhoused individuals to find shelters that fit their needs.

What it does

COS Shelter Connect centralizes shelter management and provides a platform for organizing shelter beds and locating shelter near an individual.

How we built it

Next.js, Neon PostgresSQL Database, Vercel deployment

Challenges we ran into

The largest challenge we faced was in identifying solutions that make shelter management easier, freeing up time for workers to focus on other issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Competing in our first hackathon! We are proud of identifying a problem and being able to produce a working prototype solution in 24 hours.

What we learned

We learned how to consider different needs, user stories, and experiences when approaching a problem. Some of our members also learned how to code in javascript on the fly!

What's next for COS Shelter Connect

We want our platform to be an active space for community members and shelters. We want shelters to ba able to manage their data and reach a larger audience. Additionally, we hope this can be a too for traching unhoused persons to provide them with help more reliably.

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