Name: Safe Haven (working title)

Target Audience: Employees and Social Workers in Transitional Housing Facilities

The Challenge: Residential care facilities that provide transitional housing to at-risk individuals face real-time challenges of providing housing and resources for clients experiencing homelessness, mental health issues, addiction, domestic violence, etc. Communicating with other facilities about vacancies and available resources can be time-consuming and may reduce chances of clients accessing housing.

The Solution: We build a web application that will allow users (i.e. employees of transitional housing facilities) to post available resources and vacancies, and to view resources and vacancies available at other facilities. (Example: If you are an intake worker at a residential care facility, and you have someone in front of you who is either not eligible, or not able to gain access to your facility right now, but needs housing urgently, you could use this app to tell you where this person can potentially get transitional housing right now.)

Possible blockers:

• Dependency on user activity; app would rely very heavily on this
• What will the UI look like, to ensure data is entered by users

What makes this a strong idea:

• Design can be relatively simplistic, not necessarily aesthetically driven
• Possible to start on small scale (Hamilton only), build in potential for growth to other geographical areas
• Design potentially applicable to other groups of organizations who wish to share resources