Inspiration
Too often do people find themselves homeless after experiencing unexpected setbacks in life. Things such as losing a job, facing medical debt, or experiencing mental illness can crop up very suddenly, and if caught off guard, can have lasting consequences on someone's housing situation. But if a line of defense doesn't reach an individual until they have already lost a place to call home, not only are they exposed to the damage of life without housing, but it becomes more difficult and more expensive to help them get back on their feet and back into permanent housing. Organizations such as St. Patrick's provide valuable resources to individuals who are homeless, but wouldn't it be great if everyone had a place to call home?
What it does
At Global Hack 6, a weekend hackathon, we were tasked with the goal of "hacking homelessness" in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Our team decided to focus on building a solution that was geared towards prevention of homelessness because we believe that is the most effective way to do more with less. One common reason the homeless are not able to find employment is due a lack of documentation/identification such as a driver's license or a social security card, which many of us take for granted. However, even for the educated, navigating this process can be laborious and filling out the necessary forms can be especially tedious. Our application allows case workers at homelessness centers to determine which forms a person seeking jobs may need, as well as pre-fill these forms using existing data in their database. In addition, we built a central job database that renders on Google Maps so that multiple centers can coordinate job assistance more efficiently.
How we built it
With a lot of caffeine! But really, with Node.js, Express, SQL, and Angular.js, and some cool npm modules, like angular-google-maps and pdf-fill-form.
What we learned
We learned a lot about homelessness during this hackathon especially facts that challenged stereotypes about homelessness such as how the % of homeless with mental disabilities is not as high as the public believe
What's next for Team Awesome
Team Awesome, after recently graduating from Fullstack Academy of Code, is now officially on the job hunt! We are all looking for our first software engineering opportunities and are particularly interested in working on challenging problems that impact the world.
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