This Thursday: Our Techies in Residence Pitch with Barnardo’s NI

FixIT, a picture-first housing-repair tool for refugee families, goes to the Techies in Residence seed-fund showcase. Vote if you have thirty seconds.

Published on May 18, 2021

Quick one, because Thursday is coming up fast.

For the past few months I’ve been the “techie” in a Techies in Residence pairing with Barnardo’s Northern Ireland, specifically their Refugee Support Service, the team that has been looking after Syrian families resettled in Belfast since 2015. The programme is run by the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland, delivered by Innovate NI and funded by Comic Relief, and it does one very simple thing: it puts a small tech company inside a charity for a few months and asks the two of them to build something useful together.

On Thursday 20 May at 11am the seven pairs from this year’s cohort pitch for Comic Relief seed funding at a virtual showcase. Sync NI have written it up and there is a public vote, so if you have thirty seconds I would be grateful for a click.

Sync NI article from 18 May 2021: vote on which NI tech-for-good project deserves a £12k grant — Sync NI’s write-up of this year’s showcase, with the public vote.

What we’re pitching

Sync NI describe our project as a “bilingual reporting platform for directly addressing housing issues between landlord and tenant”, which is accurate but doesn’t quite capture why it matters.

Sync NI describing the Barnardo’s and Invisible Building bilingual housing repair reporting platform — How Sync NI put it.

Picture a family who arrived in Belfast six months ago. The boiler stops working. Reporting that to the landlord means phoning a repairs line, explaining the fault in English, and chasing it up. And when you can’t, the person who ends up doing it for you is your Barnardo’s support worker. That is a bad use of a support worker’s day, and it leaves a family dependent on someone else to be heard in their own home.

So we are building a tool (working name FixIT) that takes the language out of it. You pick your language once. After that it is pictures: which room, which thing is broken, take a photo if you can, tell us how to contact you. The landlord gets a clean report in English with everything they need to send the right tradesperson. No app store, no account, works on whatever phone you have.

Why I care about this one

I’ve done a residency before, back in 2016 with AWARE through the Building Change Trust’s programme, and the thing I took from it was that the best charity tech is small and specific. Nobody in the Refugee Support Service asked for a platform. They asked for the boiler to get fixed without a phone call. If we get that right, the tool disappears and the outcome is just a warm house.

The other thing I’ve learned is that the residency is the easy part. The hard part is what happens after: hosting, upkeep, the second and third language, the tenant who wants to send a video instead of a photo. That is what the seed fund is for, and that is what we’re pitching for on Thursday.

If you want to see the pitch, the showcase is free and online. And if you know a landlord, a housing association or a refugee service anywhere in the UK or Ireland who would find this useful, I’d love an introduction.

Wish us luck.