Phoenix

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Inspiration

Can you believe that there are roughly 150,000 to 300,000 homeless people in Canada per year (Homeless Hub, n.d.)? Or that this number climbs to 150 MILLION people when you look worldwide (World Economic Forum, 2021)? Our entire team has seen how homelessness is a significantly pressing social challenge and how winter exacerbates these problems. Aarushi, Anh, and Katrina decided to use our programming knowledge and this ElleHacks 2024 to harness our skills for good and develop Phoenix, where hope starts with a home.

What it does

While there are a couple of solutions out there, we could not find just one app to encompass all services, support, resources, and help for the homeless, so we decided to use our web development skills to create the ultimate app. Phoenix provides a central hub for all resources for the homeless, including providing free education, sharing real-time updates for pop-up events, looking for locally available physical resources, offering financial support, and much more.

How we built it

We entirely created our app on Figma, using templates, plugins, and components to enhance it. Voiceflow was a handy tool to visualize our help chatbot Phoenette and its usefulness.

Challenges we ran into

At one point, we were trying to use a Figma plugin called Export Kit Lightning Storm to create our app quickly in Android Studio, however, we ended up having a lot of errors show up (plus we would need to pay to make it easier for us). We tried switching to using builder.io to convert our Figma design into a JS app, but we would also need to pay. After lots of Googling and asking for help, we decided to proceed with our Figma design and create a flowchart to represent our app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

From having an unexpected late start to spending lots of time coming up with project ideas, we are extremely proud of our final decision to develop a central resource app for the homeless community. This project

What we learned

We learned in-depth skills in graphics design, UI/UX development, web design, Figma, teamwork, leadership, and communication. Additionally, our knowledge of homeless resources in Toronto/Canada was greatly increased.