Seattle looks to the tech industry to come up with solutions connecting the homeless to services.
When the mayor announced the panel last month and was asked how the participants could help, she said they might help design an app allowing the city and nonprofits to more efficiently connect homeless people with shelter beds and benefits.
On Thursday, she said there should be realistic expectations.
“To be clear, there’s no app that’s going to fix anything,” Durkan said. “But at the same time, if we’re not using that as part of the solution … then I think we’re really missing a great opportunity.”
With the expertise of Amazon, Microsoft and so many other tech companies in Seattle, an app to connect services working with homelessness would be an opportunity to help solve a complex problem.
Yes!
One of the reasons people are homeless in the first place, is that their connections to the community they live in have frayed and become nonfunctional. We all thrive by being embedded in a functioning community that supports us in many ways, and allows us to contribute in many ways.
Homelessness is a systemic problem…and requires a systemic solution, where the homeless are “rewoven” back into the fabric of functionality. Or in plain terms, put in positions to contribute, and to find support.
We might look to the gig economy for examples of how being connected to networks and databases with smart phones and server farms, makes possible “work” and “roles” that wouldn’t otherwise exist. One would expect such apps to work both as preventative medicine to keep people from falling out of the community into homelessness and as a way back into the community.