SafeSpace

Empowering students and employees to report harassment and discrimination anonymously and securely, while providing organizations with actionable insights for a safer, more inclusive environment.

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Inspiration

SafeSpace was inspired by the need for a more inclusive and secure environment at UB. Recently, there was an incident where an employee at UB Campus Dining and Shops (CDS) harassed multiple female student employees. The individual continued this behavior for an extended period before one person formally complained, prompting others to come forward with similar experiences anonymously. This incident highlighted the barriers many employees face in reporting harassment—fear of retaliation, lack of anonymity, and insufficient resources. SafeSpace aims to break down these barriers by offering employees a secure, anonymous platform to report incidents, while providing organizations with insights to build a culture of safety, respect, and inclusion.

What it does

SafeSpace is an anonymous reporting platform for harassment and discrimination. It allows users to:

  • Report incidents anonymously.
  • HR teams can access aggregated, anonymized data analytics, allowing them to recognize patterns, monitor trends, and take preventive actions based on incident reports.

How we built it

Frontend: Built with React for a user-friendly, responsive interface, allowing employees and HR representatives to navigate through reporting, resources, and analytics easily. Backend: Developed using Node.js and Express to handle data storage, form submissions, and secure communication between the frontend and backend. Database: MongoDB for storing incident reports, and analytics. Analytics: Built an analytics dashboard in the HR interface to display aggregated incident data, identifying patterns and trends.

Challenges we ran into

Ensuring Anonymity: An issue we faced was ensuring user credibility while maintaining anonymity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • To ensure credibility while preserving anonymity, we implemented a secure backend authentication system. This endpoint verifies user credentials, raises a confirmation flag, and then discards the username and password without storing them. All data is encrypted, and only anonymized information is stored for analysis, enabling HR to identify trends without compromising individual privacy.
  • Built a comprehensive dashboard for HR to monitor incidents and spot trends while preserving employee privacy.

What we learned

Throughout the development of SafeSpace, we learned how to balance user privacy with data integrity, ensuring secure, credible incident reporting while protecting anonymity. Working on the analytics dashboard deepened our understanding of how data visualization can drive meaningful, data-driven decision-making within organizations. We also gained experience with encryption techniques to secure sensitive data and explored the challenges of designing a user-centered interface that feels safe and accessible.

What's next for SafeSpace

could not implement these due to time constraints

  • Real-Time Chat Support: Incorporate a real-time chat support feature for immediate assistance during incident reporting, offering users guidance and support.
  • Comprehensive Resources to provide employees with easily accessible information and support materials on harassment, discrimination, and mental health services, tailored to New York State and UB-specific guidelines.

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