Hack to End Homelessness

Team TLA supported Building Changes, which requested help to communicate the benefits of their innovative new strategy for homelessness prevention, called Diversion. Diversion means keeping families from ever entering the homeless service system by providing flexible, short-term resources. Hack 2 End participants worked together to create a beautiful and informative infographic that will be used to communicate the benefits of the program to funders and service providers throughout Washington State.

The Maptastics collaborated to support four different non-profit organizations. All four partners needed help to extract stories from available data and tell those stories to legislators, media, and the community. This team gathered data and development professionals to churn through available data sources, creating a series of maps that show where people have the hardest time finding affordable housing. The sponsors will use these visualizations to advocate for affordable housing with legislators and educate the general public.

The Haystack worked with Committee to End Homelessness--King County to visualize how Seattle stacks up against other metro areas in the United States. They analyzed data from 25 major cities and developed a dynamic, web-based site that summarizes data over 7 years and across multiple data points. This allows users to compare cities “apples to apples” using per-capita data, showing each community’s need and the relative scale of its response.

We Are Visible is a peer network for the homeless community to help each other through social media and online peer-to-peer support. InvisiblePeople.tv founder Mark Horvath had wanted to create such a network for over four years, but it wasn’t until Hack to End Homelessness that all of the elements came together to get the project started. The web-based application avoids the need for a credit card that most app stores require. By the end of the weekend, We Are Visible had its first user.

The SAC-ky Hackers created an e-commerce site, CMD+PRINT, to support the Sanctuary Art Center, SAC). SAC serves homeless teens and young adults with arts programs, and uses revenues from screenprinted t-shirt and art sales to support its employment internship program and retail/gallery space. Until now, sales have been limited to in-store and event sales. With CMDPRINT.com live, Sanctuary Art Center can scale up its sales and generate additional support for its employment internship program and retail/gallery space, located in Pioneer Square.

Team We Count developed an app to keep track of the needs of people living on the street. The app allows service providers like the Union Gospel Mission to meet those needs better and more efficiently while also collecting valuable data about those living on the streets. It helps service volunteers--who change daily--to conduct better street outreach, while offering service providers the capacity to document, track, and manage provision of outreach. The We Count platform will allow multiple service agencies to document their work and empower new volunteers to become immediate assets.

Team Community Resource Exchange cleaned, sorted, and analyzed a wealth of data collected just the week before at the annual United Way Community Resource Exchange. At that event, 850 people experiencing homelessness completed intake forms that described their location, the reasons they became homeless, and the reasons they were not living in shelters. This team not only turned this data into communicable graphs and charts, they helped United Way understand how to improve future data collection to reduce noise and increase usability.

Team No Child Sleeps Outside supported a collaborative effort among faith-based organizations to ensure that all children in King County have a safe, stable place to sleep. The team built a new Wordpress website that better communicates its mission, has a clear call to action, and can be kept up-to-date by permanent staff.

The YouthCare Data Analysis project helped YouthCare, which runs Seattle’s James W. Ray Orion Center and other shelters and services, better use technology to meet the needs of homeless youth. Young people ages 13-22 drop in to the Orion Center to access basic needs, connect with staff, and receive deeper services like case management, shelter, housing, education, and employment training. YouthCare had been collecting basic information about their clients during intake, but they were not able to analyze the data in its current format. The team not only developed macros allowing YouthCare to analyze its current spreadsheet data, but it developed a new interface for data collection that will make future analysis much easier.