Inspiration
OnCourse
What it does
Self-Help Prevent homelessness in the first place by getting assistance with utility payments, and domestic abuse. But also provide an avenue for requesting housing help.
Continuum of Care Administration Centralize organizations and the services they offer. Provide a way to intake a homeless person, and match them to a service in the community.k
Community Payments & Help Build trust between in the community by using the Continuum of Care as a source of truth. Allow donations to be attached to a specific homeless individual to provide a new source of data, and potential identification of influencers in the homeless community.
How we built it
It is built in ruby on Rails 5 with a variety of tools from the open source community.
Challenges we ran into
Rails 5 was maybe not the best choice. We ran into a variety of documentation and technical issues. Rails 4 is clearly the better choice for now.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Payment integration
- Automated serivce eligibilty
- Utilizing existing services
What we learned
Sleep is nice.
What's next for OnCourse
The payments feature changes HMIS from a cost center to a funding tool for organizations. It also scales with the size of the homelessness problem. By allowing clients to collect payments on behalf of the organizations that are providing them help, there is the opportunity to change panhandling from an unavoidable societal moral quandry to a positive tool for social change.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.