Regather

Inspiration

Someone close to us went through a mental health crisis, and we saw firsthand how alone their family felt afterward. They left the ER with a discharge sheet and a waitlist, and the hardest moments always seemed to come late at night when no clinic or counsellor was available. What they really needed was to talk to someone who had been through the same thing.

That's where Regather came from. We wanted to build a safe space where youth and families facing mental health struggles can connect with each other, and with families and volunteers who have already been through it.

What it does

Regather is a private peer-support platform. Users are verified through partner ERs, clinics, and nonprofits, so everyone in the space has a real connection to the experience. Instead of a public feed, Regather focuses on small groups and private chats, so people can get support any time, including outside normal work hours.

Our mascot is a pastel axolotl, an animal known for regenerating. Recovery isn't about going back to how things were. It's about rebuilding, together.

How we built it

We started with research to understand the problem and who we were building for, then moved into defining requirements, designing the user flows, and building our prototype using Next.js and Supabase. We focused on making the core experience of joining a group and chatting feel simple and safe.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was time. Our team was working during the hackathon, so we had fewer hours than most teams and were pretty exhausted while building. We had to be realistic about scope and focus on the features that mattered most.

What we learned

The biggest lesson was how much time market research actually takes. As software development students, we're used to jumping into building. We only had one class on market research, and we had never had to do it this seriously for a hackathon, let alone on such a tight deadline. Understanding the problem, the users, and existing solutions took far longer than we expected, but it shaped every decision we made after.