Our Vision

The vision of Shelta is to provide a tool for those in need to be able to look up the availability of services such as: a warm bed, a meal, employment services, a haircut, a shower and other tools for our basic human rights.

The first phase of this project is to identify shelters and to dynamically populate a map of their location.

Next we had hoped to develop a login portal for those shelters to update in real time their capacity.

Collecting data on how many people that shelters are turning away is another aspect of this project as there is little known data on how many homeless people we actually have and what that looks like from a geolocational perspective. If we can identify how many people the shelters are having to turn away then we can provide that data to the government to highlight the need in specific locations.

Once we have the shelter part of the application working our next goal is to expand the tools that someone would need to get off their feet by expanding upon the layers available to toggle on the map including: Soup kitchens (Food), Employment services, Hygiene services such as showers/laundry.

One of the most common questions we are asked is how are homeless people going to use this app - they are homeless so they don't have a computer.

Research shows that 2/3 of homeless youth have a smartphones. For those that don't have smartphones there is always an internet café, and the library. Another resource that is interested in using this application is the Police. When a police officer picks up a homeless person they are responsible for them until they can find a safe place to drop the person off.