Inspiration
New Leaf was inspired by a simple but frustrating problem: community help exists, but people in crisis often cannot find it when they need it most.
Someone who says, “We can’t buy groceries this week,” may not know to search for SNAP, WIC, school meal programs, food pantries, or 211. A family facing eviction may not know the difference between emergency rental assistance, public housing authorities, legal aid, tenant-rights organizations, and shelters. When someone is scared, overwhelmed, hungry, or about to lose housing, the problem is not just lack of resources. It is the gap between how people describe their lives and how support systems are organized online.
We built New Leaf to close that gap. Our goal was not to make another generic chatbot. We wanted to create a warm, private, safety-first crisis-support assistant that listens in plain language and turns a confusing situation into a clear next step.
What New Leaf Does
New Leaf is an AI-powered community support resource finder. A user can describe what they are going through in normal language, such as “my family might get evicted next week” or “we do not have enough food,” and New Leaf responds with a personalized plan.
Every response follows a structured, human-centered format:
It first acknowledges the user’s situation with empathy. It gives an action plan with concrete steps to take today or this week. It lists relevant resources, such as 211, 988, food assistance, housing support, legal aid, medical help, or financial support. It reminds the user to verify program details with official sources or trained human support workers.
The app also includes quick-start buttons for common needs like housing, food, utilities, mental health, legal aid, and medical care. Users can optionally add their city or ZIP code, urgency level, household size, income range, and other details so the plan can be more specific. New Leaf can also generate a 30-second call script, a document checklist, or a handoff summary for a 211 operator, counselor, caseworker, or social worker.
Most importantly, New Leaf is built around safety. Emergency resources like 911, 988, 211, and Crisis Text Line are always visible. If the user’s message suggests immediate danger, self-harm, abuse, eviction tonight, or no food today, the app prioritizes emergency and crisis resources before anything else.
How We Built It
We built New Leaf as a web application using Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui. The frontend is designed to feel calm and supportive instead of clinical or overwhelming, using a soft green “new leaf” visual identity to reinforce the idea of starting again.
The app has a landing page that explains the problem, shows what kinds of help New Leaf can support, and lets users jump directly into the chat. The chat page is the core experience. It includes the emergency support bar, the conversation interface, location input, optional intake fields, language support, quick actions, and utility buttons for call scripts, document checklists, and handoff summaries.
On the backend, we built a streaming chat API route. The system prompt defines New Leaf’s role, response format, crisis-safety rules, and location-handling behavior. Instead of giving long generic paragraphs, the AI is instructed to produce organized markdown with sections like “I Hear You,” “Your Action Plan,” and “Resources for You.” We also built a demo mode so the app can still work without a live API key, which is important for hackathon judging and offline demos.
Responsible AI
Because this app serves people in crisis, responsible AI was not an extra feature; it was the foundation of the project.
We made several design choices to reduce risk. New Leaf does not replace doctors, lawyers, caseworkers, therapists, or emergency services. It never gives specific legal, medical, or financial advice. Instead, it organizes options, explains what to ask, and points users toward official sources and human support. We also label AI confidence carefully and remind users that program details can change.
We also built the app to avoid unnecessary barriers. Users do not need an account, subscription, or login to ask for help. The core experience is meant to be fast, private, and low-friction, because people in crisis should not have to create an account before finding support.
Challenges We Faced
One of our biggest challenges was balancing helpfulness with safety. If the AI is too vague, it is not useful. But if it acts too confident, it could recommend outdated resources or make the user delay urgent help. We solved this by making New Leaf emergency-first, by requiring verification language, and by routing high-risk situations toward 911, 988, 211, or trained human support.
Another challenge was making the interface useful without feeling overwhelming. People in crisis may not want to fill out a long form. We handled this by letting users start with a simple message, while still offering optional details that can improve the plan.
A third challenge was localization. Community support depends heavily on where someone lives. We designed New Leaf to ask for location context and to avoid blindly recommending U.S.-only resources when the user is outside the United States.
What We Learned
We learned that AI is most powerful in community support when it acts as a translator between human language and institutional language. People do not naturally describe their problems using program names. They describe fear, deadlines, bills, food, rent, family, and uncertainty. AI can help map those words to the right categories of help.
We also learned that building responsible AI is not just about preventing bad outputs. It is about designing the whole user experience around human control, safety, transparency, and dignity. Sometimes the most important thing an AI can do is not answer directly, but tell the user who to contact immediately.
What’s Next
If we continue building New Leaf, we would like to connect it to verified, regularly updated local resource databases; allow community organizations to review and improve resource listings; and expand multilingual support beyond English and Spanish. We would also like to test the app with real users, social workers, school counselors, and nonprofit organizations to make sure the guidance is actually useful in stressful situations.
New Leaf is our attempt to make community support easier to find, easier to understand, and easier to act on. We built it because no one should miss help simply because they did not know the right words to search.
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