Hack For Good.

Hack For Good is an event that was organised by the team at Studio Republic as a way of getting local agencies together to design and build a solution for good in one day. This years theme, which was decided by the public, is Homelessness Services.

We had the choice of following one of the briefs set by Homelessness charities across the nation by:

• Shelter
• Step by Step
• Winchester City Council
• Society of St James

The Brief

We decided to tackle the brief set by Winchester City Council as we wanted to help improve the service that Homeless Support Workers can provide to people living homeless. By creating a service that provides Support Workers with more localised information will help improve the support that they can offer.

Signpost People to the Services They Need

Homeless Link is a national membership charity of organisations working directly with people who become homeless in England.

They do great work signposting people who are homeless towards the services they need. However, because this is a nationwide service often the information they give is very vague and doesn’t include the local information that someone working in the area might be able to help. Also, they can be slow to update service information and add new services.

Is there a more tailored, regional and specific way of signposting people to the services they need?

Our Solution:

We started off with the team discussing their ideas and trying to figure out which ones would make a real difference. It was also important to think about which ideas would be achievable within the timeframes that we had (turns out we were way too ambitious and optimistic 😅).

Our solution involved creating a cross-platform app that Support Workers can use out in the field when interacting with homeless people. They would enable their location and choose their local area e.g. Winchester. This would then provide them with up to date information on services within the local area, covering the following areas:

• Accommodation
• Food
• Advice
• Homeless Health
• Housing Department
• Outreach

Within these categories, there will be information on local services in the area. You can see an example of how this would work for accommodation below.

To help speed up the design and build process we used the Ionic framework. As this is an MVP we just used the predefined components to create the content blocks, although the next phase would involve adding some basic styling to the app.

The main problem we were trying to solve is providing localised information for support workers that are up to date. To achieve this we added the feature of being able to add updates to services.

Example

A Support Worker is out in the field trying to provide some information on accommodation in Winchester. The closest service is Winchester Churches Housing Group — Keystone. However, they don’t currently have any availability. This Homeless Hub app would allow a Support Worker to add an update to the accommodation listing say that they are full and to try other local solutions.

This means that Support Workers are getting the latest information and providing the best solution possible.

Thank you!

Our team had a great day at Hack For Good and we just wanted to say a huge thank you to Studio Republic. We’d also like to thank the sponsors involved: University of Winchester, Steadfast Collective, BySea and Stable Winchester. We look forward to next year!