HerStory

Inspiration

We were inspired by the emotions and needs of a survivor. Scared, violated and lacking knowledge. A survivor may initially need assistance finding safety as well as physical and psychological support. We combined the premise behind “chicken soup for the...” and the underground railroad. We wanted to make an accessible solution that survivors can trust to protect their anonymity while providing them with empathetic stories that validate their emotions, relevant knowledge to inform them, and potentially connecting them with local resources at whatever stage or situation they find themselves in.

What it does

SMS bot and channel to connect survivors with other survivor stories, knowledge, and resources.

How we built it

We used the Twilio SMS service to send and receive text messages from our users. We created a node web server to act as the Twilio webhook and process incoming text messages.

In order to store survivor stories and important information about resources, we built a database using django, which also allowed us to easily expose a management web page for NGOs to be able to add stories and maintain relevant information for their area. This django application also exposed an API that would allow the SMS to access database information without using SQL.

Challenges we ran into

From a technical standpoint, there were several crucial challenges. Initially, we wanted to use a chatbot to manage the SMS service and reply to users. However, chatbots are not designed to handle queries to outside web services, which we needed in order to get information from our database. In the end, we moved the conversation decision tree to our server.

Another challenge was deploying our django server to the cloud so that it was available for Twilio web hooks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing for accessibility. We created a meaningful tool that anyone with SMS capability can use to connect with an empathetic community and retrieve knowledge that empowers.

What we learned

Tackling the issue of domestic violence requires a level of empathy and sensitivity. With limited resources, we had to resort to certain assumptions to narrow our focus.