I'm working on a project with United Way in NYC that's addressing the data issues around food banks and shelters. We could use some additional tech help. It st

I'm working on a project with United Way in NYC that's addressing the data issues around food banks and shelters. We could use some additional tech help. It started after Sandy hit. All of the major charitable organizations would send resources to the areas impacted the hardest. This resulted in over servicing these areas and left about 30% of affected areas without any services at all. Also, people would be directed to food banks and shelters that were full, out of stock, closed for the day, or shut down. While other shelters and food banks remained underutilized. No one had the necessary information to direct these people to the right places. A hackathon yielded some interesting solutions for disaster recovery - one of which was a text message system (data services were unavailable for a while - coincidentally, many homeless people have phones, but not smart phones) to coordinate volunteers and service providers. We've begun to coordinate with many of the largest service providers, non-profits, local government agencies and corporate sponsors on this. There are so many needs of the homeless population that can be addressed by technology. We have no money to contribute, we're a struggling, over-worked, early stage startup, but we've found that even just a few hours a month makes a difference. Entrepreneurs and techs talk poorly of lawyers, but how many hours of pro-bono work do we perform each year? It's not all sexy work, but sometimes just cleaning some data one evening can impact thousands of people. If anyone would like to volunteer for this effort, or initiate a similar effort in their community, please reach out to me: community (at) 42stats.com