Imagine walking down the streets of Cincinnati at dusk.
You pull your coat collar up around your neck and turn your back to the bitter wind as the day winds down. Out of the corner of your eye, you see somebody huddling up under a roll of newspaper, clearly attempting to get comfy for the bitter night. You quickly rush past them, attempting to avoid eye contact. When you’re clear of them, you try to push the thoughts of the winter cold from your mind. “They probably did this to themselves,” you tell yourself. What if, instead of forgetting about people who live on the street, we instead did something to help them?
While offering a homeless person a spot on your couch might not be the best option, neither is walking past in a hurry.
In response to the problem of homelessness in Cincinnati, students at Northern Kentucky University have developed a high-tech tool to help get homeless people off the street.
The students designed an app called Street Reach that links the homeless to services and puts them in direct contact with an outreach worker, according to a Cincinnati news provider.
Here’s how the app works:
If a Cincinnati local sees someone on the street, they can use the app to enter information about the homeless person’s location and any identifying details. If they’re using the app from their phone, GPS information is included. The app then notifies local partners like Strategies to End Homelessness to come help.
However, the app also focuses on protecting the privacy of the individual you’re trying to help. Walking up to somebody who is clearly having a rough time and asking them personal questions is not the way to deal with such a situation.
Instead, the app encourages users to intervene from a distance and then let a trained outreach professional step in:
Rachael Winters, an NKU social work lecturer, said the purpose of Street Reach is a temporary fix to keep people safe and alive on nights they need help the most.
Street Reach is really for the individual who is on the sidewalk, out in the cold, could be exposed to hypothermia or could freeze to death. That’s what this app is for to get those people off the street and into a shelter or housing.
While this certainly doesn’t fix the problem of homelessness, it certainly aids the cause when conditions are dire. Unfortunately, the app is only available to those in Cincinnati at the moment, but spread the word. After all, Facebook was only a small website that was solely available to Harvard students…until it wasn’t. Spread the word about Street Reach too!
[Featured Image Credit: Rack CDN]