The competition last week was the culmination of a summer internship in which students learned to build mobile apps capable of addressing issues in their communities.
The winning app, called Seevity and designed by Reign Winston and Selena Sosa-Carroll, takes aim at the challenges of poverty, letting users set up a profile to find local resources. In a demonstration, Winston and Sosa-Carroll created a user persona, “Layla,” to show how the app works.
A single parent who just lost her house, Layla has two kids and an elderly mother. When Layla adds these details to Seevity, the app produces a list of resources tailored to her needs, like housing assistance and elder-care options. Other resource categories on the app include scholarships, transportation, employment, child care and personal support.
“I feel like poverty is a really huge thing in Detroit even in, like, parts of Detroit we don’t know about or parts of Michigan that we don’t know about,” Winston said. “And I feel like if we have the resources, then we have the chance and the opportunity to make it better.”
NAF has academies at more than 20 high schools in the Detroit Public Schools Community District and nearby Southfield Public School District. Students enrolled in NAF programs at these schools were invited to apply for the paid internship this summer, which ended in the competition.
The internship, called the NAF Detroit Future Ready Lab, was funded by the Ballmer Group and run by JOURNi, a Detroit nonprofit that provides courses for high school students. Students earned $18 an hour during the six-week internship, and got the training they needed to develop their apps.
According to JOURNi co-founder and CEO Richard Grundy, nearly 150 students applied for the internship and 47 were accepted. The students were asked to come up with apps to benefit their communities, later forming teams to create a total of 13 prototypes.
“We let the students direct what they want their app to be,” Grundy said. “They’re coming with their own experiences and knowledge to put into that app.”
The 13 prototypes included an app to connect people with quality local health care; an app for local vendors; and an app to promote driver safety by reducing phone distractions.
NAF Chief Advancement Officer Valaida Wynn Guerrero said providing students with opportunities like the internship is central to the organization’s work-based approach to teaching and learning.
“We know that with greater access to these opportunities, especially for students in under-resourced communities, we can help them move toward a life of upward economic mobility and success, which is our ultimate goal,” she said.
