Lighthouse

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  A guided path to recovery

Inspiration

Over 60,000 homeless individuals sleep in NYC shelters. Thousands more unaccounted homeless citizens sleep on the city streets and subways. We found that there is no centralized service to present homeless prevention tools and services to agencies and individuals in need.

What it does

Our web application consolidates already in place services, and presents a minimal and localized guide for clients that want real-time.

How we built it

We combed the NYC Open Data site for datasets that would be most immediately beneficial to homeless individuals and Homelessness prevention agencies. Our team queried these resources for the most permanent information. Then we created a visual representation on Google Maps.

Challenges we ran into

As a team we faced difficulty merging our code. We worked through communicating our changes to each other and writing our code in a readable manner. It was also quite the effort learning how to use and integrate the APIs. In the end, however, we created a product that realized our solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a simple, yet impactful full stack application that is a solution to a very real problem.

What we learned

Team Collaboration/ Division of labor New Technologies and APIs Power of utilizing data for social good

What's next for Lighthouse

We want to improve the ease of use for our program to cater to disabled users by integrating it with IBM Watson's Text-To-Speech, Speech-To-Text.

Built With

• bootstrap
• google-maps
• javascript
• nyc-open-data
• react