A check-ins app for volunteers to track deliveries of clean clothing to the homeless in LA
Project Ropa is a free mobile hygiene service that brings clean clothing and hygiene kits directly to people experiencing homelessness in the Greater Los Angeles area in a safe, humane and dignified way. Project Ropa has a retrofitted van that functions as a mobile walk-in closet, carrying a full selection of clothes, shoes and accessories. They have served over 32,000 individuals in the last 5 years and distributed over 87,000 lbs of clothing.
Although Project Ropa serves hundreds of people per month, they didn’t have a simple but efficient way to keep track of the individuals they served in the homeless community.
In order to help solve this problem, we created an offline forms mobile application, so volunteers would be able to better track their deliveries of hygiene kits and clean clothing to the homeless population in LA, regardless of internet connection.
Within this platform, we also created a check-in feature; once a user was registered and recorded in the database, each time they used Project Ropa, volunteers would just have to enter their name to check-in, as their data was stored in our database.
Questions asked during the original registration of a person experiencing homelessness included: race, ethnicity, age, gender, current living situation, and whether they were seeking housing or employment. This data can be used to:
Since its release, our app has been used to record 150 people a week, enabling Project Ropa to collect data in larger volumes, more efficiently, and more robustly without post-processing.
