THE PROBLEM

In the Tallahassee area, on any given day, there are over 1000 individuals experiencing homelessness. Our greatest challenge is lack of affordable housing. Current government funding is inconsistent and tentative.

When homeless individuals move from the street into permanent housing, many obtain employment and become contributing members of our community. Linked below is one future success story. Tamara is currently waiting for a permanent housing unit for her young family: https://goo.gl/fOcj6c

THIS PROJECT

We are building a web portal to give people in our community an opportunity to learn about local homelessness, those affected by it, the progress we’re making as we address it and to give them an opportunity to support our multi-agency intervention by purchasing permanent housing units.

We developed this project because we recognize that the most effective way to solve this problem is with a collaborative approach that utilizes and improves upon the homelessness service system already in place.

Our ‘Stats and Stories’ web portal will provide interactive, real-time, local homelessness statistics with the ability to drill down to the individuals (and stories) that comprise those statistics.

Visitors will be able to browse creatively presented and inspiring stories of individuals building better lives while, from the same screen, having access to the statistics and the ‘bigger picture.’

ABOUT US

The Big Bend Continuum of Care is a network of 35 different agencies in the Big Bend Area of north Florida, working together to house our homeless neighbors. We understand that when one individual is stably housed it benefits taxpayers, our institutions and our entire community. We believe many in this eight-county region also realize this and would support our collaborative effort if they knew of our work and how effectively their dollars would be spent. We practice and have had great success with the Housing First approach which has been shown to be the most cost-effective way to address the homelessness crisis.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

We need $3,000.00 for technical assistance to complete development of the web portal. Our in-progress prototype is posted here (not yet mobile-compatible): https://goo.gl/XF2x8I

• $2,000.00 of that amount will provide 20 hours of web programming consultation (at 100.00/hr.) to help build the cross-platform front-end and the SQL database to deliver real-time stats and fresh stories to visitors.

• $1,000.00 will provide 25 hours of content development (at 40.00/hr.) for the interactive, animated stories.

We look forward to bringing this project to life with your help and to putting individuals and families into homes.

Thank you for your support!