In the East Bay of the 21st century, finding free wifi can be easier than finding housing and food. Many homeless people have a smartphone and some access to the Internet, but need help finding social services such as a food bank open today, or a social worker or free clinic open tomorrow. Homeless Connection aims to fill this gap.
East Bay Homeless Connection is a mobile-optimized website, enabling users to find social services such as walk-in clinics, social services, food, and shelter. Our Executive Director Dan Rademacher saw the need for Homeless Connection over more than a decade volunteering at a homeless breakfast program in Berkeley. Though many homeless people, particularly younger people, have second-hand smartphones and ready access to free WiFi, information about social services was still distributed mostly by printed signs posted at service providers or desktop-only websites.
The Homeless Connection interface is intended to load quickly over minimal data plans and poor reception, with a lean feature set that functions well on old handed-down devices.
The intention was for the the data to be directly managed by Dorothy Day House volunteers—most themselves homeless—using the free tier of a service called AirTable. Working with AirTable provided some easy approaches and some technical challenges. The AirTable back-end interface allows DDH volunteers to manage the data, tagging each location with its open hours and days, services offered, and map location. Though it has some limitations, the AirTable API made a quick and easy path to program the website for fetching data.
Once we launched the service, however, we discovered that keeping the data updated through AirTable was more complex than we expected, and over time the data became outdated. We sunsetted
GreenInfo created East Bay Homeless Connections free of charge.
Focus: Human Services, Philanthropy, Public Health, Social Justice/Equity
Services: Interactive Solutions, GIS Services, Communications, Strategy, Data, Applications Development, Web Mapping, Mobile Applications
Project Years: 2017 - 2018