CommuniCare

This project is part of the i4x program at UCSD, in partnership with Father Joe's Villages.

Father Joe's Villages is San Diego's largest homeless-services provider. Through UC San Diego's i4x program at The Basement, six of us spent winter and spring 2025 embedded with their team on one problem: people experiencing homelessness often lose access to their phones and phone numbers, so they miss urgent alerts - weather updates, encampment bans - and critical appointments with Father Joe's. How do you design a tool that bridges that gap?

From research to prototype

• Research. Studied existing tools and surveyed people experiencing homelessness.
• Interviews. Talked with Father Joe's day-center and street-health staff, and held focus groups and one-on-one interviews with sheltered and unsheltered people - 20+ onsite conversations in all.
• Ideation. Group brainstorms, feasibility charts, and teams split by strength.
• Prototyping. Mockups in Figma and GitHub, then feature-by-feature iterations assembled into the app.

CommuniCare

A joint app and website that improves access to essential resources for people experiencing homelessness. It gives clients a direct line to Father Joe's Villages staff: request medical assistance by sharing a location, receive real-time alerts and updates, and chat with staff about individual needs - built for low connectivity and basic devices, with offline features on both the client and staff sides.

Next steps

Keep iterating both the staff and client interfaces, bring the website and app to full cross-platform parity, and improve accessibility for clients - languages, text size, and more.

The project was featured on ABC 10News.