On September 24, 2016 AngelHack’s Director of Social Innovation, Rachel Katz had the opportunity to participate as one of the panel members at The Tech Museum in San Jose for the hackathon, “Hack Homelessness.” The teams participating had to think critically and build something in the span of a few short days all with a singular mission in mind: create innovative projects that fight homelessness.
The passion behind these various projects continues to fuel our efforts at AngelHack and our nonprofit “Code For A Cause.” We were beyond impressed with these men and women innovators and their inspirational efforts towards fighting homelessness.
Meet the Winners:
1st place! Team StreetLight
This team consists of four friends: Ji, Victor, Patrick, and Brendan. Ji, Victor and Patrick recently graduated from Hack Reactor Remote and Brendan is a MakerSquare grad/ TA, who is currently an AngularJs developer. The app works to produce a social network site that includes a map allowing for nonprofits to coordinate more effectively in aiding to the homeless. “We first began thinking about food because that’s sort of the first thing on everyone’s mind when it comes to the homeless,” said the team, “but as we spoke to judges and volunteers we found that there is actually enough food in most metropolitan areas and that the issue instead was in getting the full range of services an individual might need such as, healthcare, job programs, food, etc.”
Team Streetlight at the Hackathon!
Team PublicBnB
Founded by Marlon J. Frausto and Anna Wu, this is one of the three winning projects. This application aims to tackle the lack affordable housing by producing an interactive marketplace between public housing applicants and hosts. Learn more about their project here, and read more about how they’re tackling the issue here. Anna is also a founder of fedup.co – an effort to increase awareness of the gender imbalance in the tech industry. Awesome!
Marlon & Anna from PublicBnb!
Team CorkBoard
The last of the winning teams hails from Coding Dojo, a Silicon Valley coding bootcamp. This group of veterans consists of Eli, Chad, and Amrita, who won “top honors” at TechCrunch for their “in-flight travel app.” CorkBoard is an app that provides a solution for the homeless and helps them to seek out their lost loved ones. Through the app you are able to upload a detailed profile with the information of the person’s last sighting free of charge and registration.
Team CorkBoard!
Congratulations to these three amazing groups! We are so proud of these winning projects and the specific mission behind each one. You rock!
