building tools to help refugees re-build their lives in the United States.
participated in Re:source
A Refugee Hackathon hosted by the Refugee Center Online in partnership with the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, AMENA Center for Entrepreneurship, Upwardly Globally, San Francisco Cairs, General Assembly and WeTrust.
The goal of the Re:source Hackathon was to build new tools to help refugees and immigrants re-build their lives in the United States.
The hackathon was an all-day event from 9 am to 9 pm.
the problem
Newcomers face so many structural barriers that make it difficult for them to succeed. They face barriers to employment like lack of resources, language, transportation, limited ability to further education, difficulty to transfer credentials, survival jobs that limit free time for job searching and language learning.
They also face barriers to social networks, to information quality, they face isolation and lack traditional support from family, kin and other network structures.
“In the 2012-2014 period, approximately 1.8 million college-educated immigrants in the U.S. labor market were either unemployed or working in low-skilled jobs”
IDEATING SOLUTIONS
I had the luck of make team with an amazing group of talented people. We all shared our motivations and reasons to join this hackaton. For many of us the subject touched our hearts because we have refugee friends and have presence their struggle. Also, some of us as immigrants, we can relate and empathize with the refugee situation.
We decided to do an user interview with a refugee friend and hear of her situation. After gaining more insights from this talk and with the data and information the refugee center had already shared with us during the morning, we started working on the idea of an online platform, a community forum where volunteers and refugees could meet to exchange valuable information that would facilitate their job search and would also provide them with encouragement and the feeling of belonging to a community.
After thinking more and more about it, we realized how important was for refugees to hear from their counterparts about their own stories, the decisions they took, the path that they'd taken, their failures, their success and the resources that help them.
We decided to re-direct our idea and ideated:
RE:PATH, Success stories from refugees from the world
A blog-like website where a refugee success story would be showcased every month and will contain three action items (resources) that could be used by other refugees.
Our objectives:
Help refugees keep motivated during their struggles of job searching.
Minimize isolation, Maximize encouragement
Provide action items related to their struggle
Gamify the process to incentivize more posting and referral
Using current social media platforms
Click to visit
