DAWN

As our team members commute to and from school, in the heart of our city, we can’t help but notice the tents and inhumane living conditions of the unhoused lined across sidewalks and streets. To our shock, homelessness in our region, Waterloo, has increased by over 34 per cent between November 2020 and May 2021. The divide only grows as barriers such as access to resources and employment opportunities continue to exist.

​Aalaa Rehman, one of the cofounders of VirtueL and creators of DAWN, works within the city and saw firsthand the struggles of the unhoused population. One particular struggle she found was not knowing where to find certain resources, and another was not being able to get any jobs due to the heavy stigmatization of the homeless population.

This stigmatization causes problems on a nationwide scale. People think the homeless are 'too lazy' and must 'get to work', but in the same breath would never hire a homeless person. The stigma around being homeless causes a cycle where they are not able to get help as no one is willing to associate with them, and are not willing to give them a job but will call them terrible people for their own misconceptions.

VirtueL was formed to tackle this issue, and the brainstorming began to make a solution to tackle it. We wanted to both provide resources to the homeless population, but also to begin the process of ending the stigmas around them and help others create a larger community with them.

Our solution is DAWN. DAWN was made to connect the homeless population with opportunities to help turn their lives around.

We chose the name DAWN, as it represents a new day and a new beginning.

At the moment, DAWN provides the homeless population access to location services, like finding the nearest shelter, foodbank, or soup kitchens.

Key features we plan on incorporating in the immediate future are employment opportunities and options to donate.

DAWN’s employment platform would work similarly to the gig economy, as a place where unhoused people are connected to short-term employment opportunities like snow shovelling or lawn mowing, allowing them to contribute to the community and be paid for their services.

DAWN’s donation page would be a platform enabling users to donate to causes supporting the homeless. We are in the process of improving our prototype, as currently our working model is simply the minimum viable product. We already have the location based resources working,although with a limited database for the time being. We have used the thunkable app creator, as we were under a deadline for the MVP, but are looking for new softwares to create it within.

Built With

• thunkable