A Sweet Solution to a Sour Problem

Background

Clementine was created over the course of GlobalHack VI, a million-dollar weekend hackathon in St. Louis, in which this project won Second Place within the Youth Division (Team #14).

Mission

Develop civic technology directed towards addressing homelessness

Approach

1. Provide homeless users an aggregate view of nearby shelters, CoC (Continuum of Care) providers, and long-term housing solutions in which they can locate and reserve services.

   • Clementine provides an enjoyable experience across devices and can even utilize GPS for locating the client when using a mobile phone
   • Clementine provides users a simple registration process that takes care of the necessary paperwork to receive help
   • Homeless clients have a profile that outlines their essential information
     • CoCs are able to see a client's history and leave comments for other CoCs, thus ameliorating communication and data-sharing
   • Unauthenticated clients can still view nearby services but do not have as much of a tailored experience (e.g. they may see incompatible shelters with their unique situation)
   • Provide an automated numbers for clients without access to the website to call or text to access the same information (todo)

2. CoC (Continuum of Care) providers use Clementine as a revamped HMIS (Homeless Management Information System) in which they can better cater to the homeless population, manage their resources more effectively, and easily communicate with other service providers within a secure, scalable Cloud environment.

   • CoCs have a better reservation system that updates vacancy statistics in real-time
   • CoCs are able to refer homeless clients to other providers in a streamlined manner.
   • CoCs can view analytic visualizations generated from big data to better understand the behavior of their clients and determine the effectiveness of their services

3. People can volunteer as hosts, participating in an Airbnb-esque program in which they lease unused property for temporarily housing the homeless in exchange for tax deductions.

4. Related parties can aid in early prevention by notifying CoCs with information on people who are at risk of becoming homeless.

   • For example, utility and mortgage providers can notify CoCs on Clementine if a client is unable to pay on time and then activate supportive mechanisms for prevention

Built With

• PHP
• MySQL
• HTML5 / CSS / JavaScript
• Material Design Lite
• Google Maps API
• Chart.js
• Heroku

Team

Clementine was developed by a team of three (3) community-oriented, high-school seniors from MICDS in St. Louis, Missouri.