Building Both Technology and Community to Address Homelessness in San Francisco

ShelterTech is currently a 50 member strong all-volunteer non-profit, bringing free wifi and other digital tools to the homeless community of San Francisco.

In November 2017, we won a grant from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development to collaborate with the SF Bar Association’s Homeless Advocacy Project to digitize their bi-annual print-only resource guide consisting of hundreds of pages on housing, healthcare, job training, education, and other social services. AskDarcel.org, the new online resource guide, now has a database of over 700 organizations and 1100 services available to those in need in SF.

Our goal is to help solve some of the biggest technology challenges faced by those experiencing homelessness, including providing information to help individuals cope with homelessness and get on a path to housing.

To achieve this goal, ShelterTech has adopted the Open Referral format — to both facilitate AskDarcel’s internal resource directory information management and to enable their application to integrate with the broader ecosystem of health, human, and social services activities in the Bay Area including 2-1-1, government agency databases, and a new human services data sharing initiative being developed by Benetech. Our adoption of Open Referral, along with our commitment to open sourcing their projects, played an important role in their grant application with the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. Continue reading

Continue reading


San Francisco’s Open Referral: Getting out and Staying out

Every other year, the Reentry Council of San Francisco publishes Getting Out and Staying Out, a resource guide for people returning from prison and looking for help to get back on their feet. The Guide is more than 300 pages long, containing rich information about hundreds of health, human, and social services that are available to homecoming residents.

The Guide is distributed through the Reentry Council’s institutional network of courts, prisons, family support services, and beyond. It’s also available on their website as a PDF.

The Reentry Council estimates that it invests at least one month of staff time each year into the Guide’s production (through a combination of surveys, web research, and phone calls). Since 2007, they’ve managed the Guide’s content entirely within Microsoft Word. Continue reading

Continue reading


Open Referral all over: hacks at Code Across and Open Data Day

Last month, during International Open Data Day — which coincided with Code for America’s CodeAcross activities throughout the weekend of February 20-22nd — hundreds of civic hacking events around the world brought together community leaders, technologists, planners, government officials, and more.

150211-CodeAcross2015_Banner-smallParticipants identified common challenges and worked together to envision, design, and even prototype new kinds of solutions.

This year, Open Referral turned out to be a popular challenge! Here’s a roundup of some of the activities. Continue reading

Continue reading