Overview

Problem

For many young people, homelessness is a fluid experience rather than a static state, and one's accommodations and options may change fairly radically and frequently.

A range of 20-40% of the homeless youth in Ottawa identify as LGBTQ2S+. This overrepresentation can be explained by homophobia and transphobia in families, schools, and communities, making it difficult to remain at home or access safe shelter.

Opportunity

There is an opportunity to establish informal channels for queer youth to access information about housing opportunities, services, landlords, and/or roommates. A social media platform dedicated to queer housing, crowdsourced information about safe landlords or buildings and facilitating more opportunities for peer mentorship and support among queer youth.

Goals

To empower queer youth through education, knowledge sharing, and awareness building.

To combat barriers: lack of awareness of service availability, eligibility criteria, or purpose; fear or discomfort accessing services due to violence/discrimination or negative past experiences; a lack of connection to services or informal support networks.

Log In and Verification

Safe onboarding is a very important factor when verifying who has access to this safe space. It's necessary to have a slight barrier to keep potential unwanted people (ex. people that could take advantage of this vulnerable community) from accessing sensitive information while also making sure the target market don't have trouble accessing the platform. Users would need to be invited by an existing verified profile. This would provide them with a verification code that can be used during sign up.

Dashboard

Solace's dashboard has 5 main screens; Shelter, Connect, Home, Resources, and Profile.

Shelter

The Shelter screen is the area of the app where users can find, share, and review safe shelters and available housing in the area.

Connect

The Connect screen is where users can find and create their own safe community. Communities are large group chats based around specific topics, common interests, or shared experiences. Within these communities, users can follow each other and chat.

Home

The Home screen is where users can see posts and reviews from people they follow as well as make their own posts.

Resources

The Resources screen is where users can find lists of local social programs and non-profit organizations that may be helpful for their specific situation. The list can be filtered by purpose, rating, gender focus, etc.

Profile

The Profile screen is where users can set up their profile, see their followers and following, and see their own posts. For some, self expression may not be safe on more open social media. This would be the place they could portray their most authentic selves. This is also where they can access and shareable referral code to a potential new user.

Branding

The goal for the branding of this project was fun and playful in order to bring brightness to a struggling demographic.