Sheltermap

What it does

There is a growing number of people experiencing homelessness in Vancouver. The 2017 Homeless Count in Metro Vancouver Report identified 3,604 people to be homeless on March 8, 2017. Homelessness has increased 30% between 2014 and 2017.

Sheltermap aims to help improve Canada’s social assistance programs by empowering marginalized members of the community with easy access to tools and information about housing facilities in their community as well as provide statistics for social workers and policy makers. The vision is to establish a centralized online resource that people in need with housing facilities and to provide long term statistical data to shelter managers.

Sheltermap greets the user with search bar of homeless shelters in the Greater Vancouver Area. Contact information and directions via Google Maps is listed for each shelter. The user can also choose to filter based on other criteria, such as women-only or minor-only facilities. The number of available beds is updated every 30 minutes.

Sheltermap provides shelter facilities with easy to use tools to collect data on the demographic and number of clients that use their facilities. Every time a person checks in, Sheltermap updates the number of available beds available. A social worker would enter in the client’s age and sex in a form, which is stored in a database for better coordination between shelters in the region. Sheltermap will be able to track long term trends among each shelter as well as paint a better overall picture of the homeless population in the Metro Vancouver Area. Sheltermap recognizes individuals that identify as non-binary, a statistic that is undocumented prior to 2017.

One of our team members was proud that he the got the opportunity to implement React for the first time into the project.