Homely

Giving a hand up to those who are homeless or migrant

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Inspiration

Homely - Find your Home in your World There are so many homeless people out there in the world. We as passionate techies wanted to use technology to increase awareness and opportunities for these people to make the best of their life in an efficient way.

With our research and analysis, we realized that there are enough jobs for such people. The big gap is the right way to be the bridge between the homeless people and the opportunities and connect them with technology.

Beyond structural factors and systemic failures, anyone can become homeless. Sometimes it happens beyond anyone's control, like being financially dependent on a loved one who was unexpectedly murdered or being involved in a car crash that renders one immobile to physically go to work.

150 million people are estimated to be homeless worldwide, with 15 million forcefully evicted and 22 million displaced due to climate change events every year.

Often being homeless means lacking basic human rights such as the right to Work. Without a permanent address in the United States, for example, you can't apply for a bank account and you can't apply for jobs. Recognizing this, we envisioned giving homeless people a hand up by creating a job ecosystem designed to help sustain them during their transition period.

What it does

Homely is a PWA (Progressive Web App) that acts as your digital identity and helps you find the opportunities available out there. We have three types of users: users

Hand Up is a platform where users can find job opportunities that are ad-hoc, short-term, and can be done at users' convenience, either remotely or locally. Companies and small businesses who are committed to helping this migrant population can post job opportunities on anything from data cleaning jobs to participating in focus groups where payment can come in a non-traditional form like gift cards for their own business or for other businesses to purchase food and other necessities. Jobs listed will provide the number of hours anticipated to complete the job, number of people who can carry out the job, whether it's a remote opportunity or a local one, along with a deadline date for completion, at which point the job will expire and no longer show on the list. Job posters can then see the job on the list, edit them, and see who's applied to then approve. On the flip side, users can quickly apply with the click of a button using info from their profile.

Providers

  • Providers are the people who carry opportunities.
  • These opportunities can be in any form.
  • Homely lets providers set up these opportunities.
  • Providers can fill in the total capacity and details about the work.
  • They can also add eligibility criteria and the location of the work.
  • Once providers put in the info, these cards are then spread across to be viewed by the homeless people.

Homeless Users

  • These people can register themselves in our Web Application.
  • Their name, image and other details act as their digital Homely identity.
  • Further, these identities are endorsed by Admins members who monitor the usage and other details.
  • These endorsements act as a badge of trust about the user and their identity. These endorsements can be done online or offline depending upon the demand and requirements.

How we built it

We built it with:

  • NEXT JS
  • Chakra UI
  • Firebase
  • Bootstrap
  • Lots of Love

Challenges we ran into

  • Timezone differences
  • Authentication setup and DevOps

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built an End to End Web Application
  • Learnt about best coding practices
  • Collaborating with a team across different timezones

What we learned

  • JWT Authentication
  • Chakra UI
  • Building Progressive Web Apps
  • NEXT JS

What's next for Homely

If we had more time we would've built out functionality to associate users with nonprofit organizations they might be working with to help them get back on their feat. This provides a way for job posters to build relationships with non-governmental organizations, who can help hold their clients accountable or provide context on what's happening with the client user. We would also:

  • Add Accuracy and Reliability based on User Identity
  • Improve upon UX of the App
  • Add more features and functionalities to the App

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