Future Without Borders
A iOS application that allows citizens in European Countries to host Syrian Refugees as they are fleeing war
Checkout our website for more information! http://futurewithoutborders.org/
Summary
Humanity has faced many challenges throughout history, and even though this is the twenty first century we still face many challenges today. Living in the west shelters us from many of these crisis that occur daily, often without our knowledge. One of these issues that has just begun to get noticed here is the Syrian refuge crisis. With over 16 million people displaced, nearly 1 in every 13 Syrians is a refugee; these refugees are flooding into Europe and other nearby countries in attempt to escape civil war, isis, and now recently Russian drone strikes.
Breaking the problem down
So we decided to address this incredible problem. How do we help these countries handle such large influxes of immigration. How do provide basic necessities such as shelter, food, and water? And most importantly how do we make sure these people are not forgotten. Governments are doing very little for these refugees, so we came up with a unique solution. We decided to have citizens across Europe sign up to host just 1 refugee family. Alone it’s very difficult to elicit change, however with many people working together we realized that a large problem could be broken down.
Our Solution
Hosts across Europe use our mobile app to sign up and offer a family a place to stay. Our app links to a parse, backend that discovers the nearest refugees and displays them to the hosts. So this allows hosts to discover refugees, but how do refugees find hosts? The average refugee fleeing from war won’t have a smartphone, so all they need to do is text our number, and we provide them with essential info on where to go, who to contact, and how to get there, all simply through sms. This we accomplished through the Twilio api sitting on IBM Bluemix as our cloud deployment, from there we interfaced with parse to find the best possible match between refugees and hosts. We used the internet of things to make european cities more responsive to influxes, and are launching a global initiative to help the tragedy from escalating any further. We hope you’ll join us in transcending human borders, and make our product a phenomena across the globe!
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