Project Relief and Recovery

An application to integrate data from multiple agencies to better provide services across the Continuum of Care.

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Project Relief and Recovery

Project Relief and Recovery is an application developed to help relieve the administrative burden on professionals and volunteers who help the homeless as well as provide a more effective clearinghouse for the resources available to initiate recovery from the underlying causes of homelessness.

Project Relief and Recovery reduces duplication of homeless clients’ records across various agencies’ systems. It allows searching by first or last name with confirmation by date of birth where available. If the client is not already in the database, Project Relief and Recovery facilitates an easy process of adding a new client.

In analyzing the data sets required, our team realized that a more thorough resource dataset needed to be developed for the shelters and front line professionals that work with the homeless on a daily basis. One of our first tasks was to conduct additional research to develop and geocode a comprehensive database of facilities that provide services to the homeless. This allowed us to develop the underlying framework for a prototype mapping application that can provide critical real-time data on shelter vacancies as well as specialized services that may be available at different facilities.

Privacy is another major concern for the homeless, and our team extensively discussed what portions of the application should be public-facing and what information should be limited to professionals and first responders. The application has a registration/login function to control access.

This application also facilitates finding beds for the night across multiple agencies and locations while updating the number of beds taken to reduce over booking. It provides a full address with a contact telephone number for shelters and auxiliary services such as, mental and medical health care, professional development, and meal services, where publicly available. For facilities that act as shelters, Project Relief and Recovery displays additional information regarding available beds and qualifiers for service.

This application can be easily enhanced and would lend itself towards future mobile application development. Ultimately, it can be extended for numerous purposes to better allow the homeless community and support systems to connect.

The application was developed in the Laravel Framework for PHP and utilizes MySQL for databases. Bootstrap is integrated into Laravel for user interface development. The Google Maps Javascript API is used for the mapping functions.

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