Hope Haven - alleviating the challenges faced by the unhoused community in San Diego

The Project

Hope Haven is a mobile app designed to support individuals experiencing homelessness in San Diego while also helping community members find ways to volunteer and donate. The app provides centralized access to shelter resources, food programs, medical services, and volunteer opportunities all in one place. Each resource includes important information such as hours, contact details, addresses, and maps to make support easier to access. Hope Haven also includes an AI-powered chat feature that helps users navigate resources and ask more complex questions. My inspiration for Hope Haven came from when I first joined my school in 9th grade, and one of the first flexes I joined was Lucky Ducklings, which supports and donates to San Diego's unhoused community. This flex was my first experience with service organizations, and I immediately became invested in it. I became one of the leaders of the flex in 10th grade, and through my experiences, I realized that one of the greatest obstacles in the homeless community is not always the lack of resources, but rather the lack of awareness or up-to-date information about where and how to find them. This realization inspired me to create Hope Haven: not only to act as a resource but also to target the root causes of why certain resources aren’t successfully accessed. One of my biggest challenges was integrating both the maps and AI features into the app. Setting up the map system was especially difficult because I had to learn how to work with location data and coordinates in order to correctly display and organize resources by location. Integrating the AI chat feature was also challenging because I needed to connect multiple technologies together and make sure the responses were accurate and easy for users to understand. Working through these technical challenges taught me a lot about app development and problem-solving.

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