Haven

Empowering women and communities by discovering and sharing safe spaces, both online and in the real world.

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Inspiration

As women, we've all experienced that fear. Maybe you were stuck at the library working on homework or maybe you just want to check out a cute coffee shop in a part of town that you've never been to. As you're walking, you feel someone following you and you're too scared to look back. Because looking back will let them know you've noticed them. Unfortunately, we're all really familiar with that feeling. There have been trips cancelled because we don't know the area well enough, places that we can never go to just because it's too much of a risk. So we wanted to do something about it. We wanted to create a way for women to feel safer and more confident in their everyday lives. Haven is all about giving women the tools they need to feel in control and secure wherever they go.

What it does

Upon opening the app, users are greeted with a map displaying their current location. They have the power to search for specific locations, each marked with a safety score as well as reviews from fellow users. In addition to those locations, Haven will also show them safe locations within walking distance of the location they searched for. There is a heatmap layer that shows the general danger of each subdistrict in the area. This intuitive interface ensures that users can make informed decisions about where they go and how they navigate their surroundings.

The heart of Haven lies in its commitment to fostering community and empowerment. Users can anonymously share their experiences as well as rate the general safety of different locations by posting reviews. They can also choose to upvote posts that others have made if they find themselves agreeing with the review or have experienced something similar in the area. These reviews are taken into account when determining the safety score of a certain location. This live contribution to a collective pool of knowledge not only helps others stay safe, it also amplifies each other's voices.

How we built it

Haven utilizes a Python Flask backend and a React frontend with Tailwind styling. API calls to Mapbox provide real-time location data and mapping functionalities, enhancing the user experience and ensuring accurate information. For the heatmap, we utilized a dataset of over 900k reported crimes in LA from 2020 to 2023. We took into account the severity of the crimes as well as the victim demographic to generate the 'safety' scores.

Challenges we ran into

  • Mapbox's lack of documentation and rigid usage caused a lot of pain when it came to styling or just display in general
  • We had initially implemented firestore for our database, however due to the dataset, we very quickly reached the read and write limit in the free plan. So we had to convert to a local postgresql database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Our patience with mapbox

What we learned

  • Mapbox is awful

What's next for Haven

We hope to see a future where Haven becomes a safe space for everyone to use and speak up on. Currently the app only covers the Los Angeles Area. In the future we hope to expand it to cover worldwide. By amplifying user feedback and refining our safety assessments, we aim to transform fear into empowerment and create a place where everyone feels safe and supported.

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