The Helping Project

A tiny home community for the homeless and people below the poverty line and will have a variety of resources. 

Make homeless people feel heard about their problems and help them solve them. There are an estimated 1,605 homeless in Washoe county. A total of 7,000 in Nevada. many people are affected: families, friends, and strangers around them. Gambling is a significant contributor to this problem. There are 459 licensed casinos in Nevada. Constantly being surrounded by this idea of gambling is pushed onto people leading to addiction and finical burden. 

Our solution was to help our community of those who don't have the resources and basic necessities. The resources given in the community will be a mental health center, substance abuse counseling, job training, and a caseworker. These will help to improve mental health, get their substance abuse under control, prepare them for a job, and give them other basic necessities. Our tiny homes will be 3-D printed and the community will be run on solar. 

Our target population is individuals and families who are struggling to meet their basic needs in life. it will make aspects of their lives easier and shift their focus from surviving to getting a stable home these are people who are in our community but for unknown reasons they are not fully able to support their own basic needs. it will address their needs by allowing them to have their basic needs met so they can focus on getting off the streets.

We are acquainted with people close to us who have dealt with homelessness. Since we have first-hand experience being surrounded by heavy gambling and our community relies on the casinos, we grow up believing that gambling is a normal thing and people fall into the idea that this addiction is okay. Our economy is heavily reliant on these casinos to stay open for 24 hours. Our group volunteers at a local community garden and food bank. 

We have worked and talked to non-profits and people in our area to help us understand the position of the people we want to help. For some people in our group, it has been a close topic, and has been through similar situations. We have volunteered at food banks that help the underprivileged as well as community gardens through another program some of us also take a part in, and it helped us understand this project more.

A new approach we have added is using 3-D printers to build the tiny homes as it will be much faster to get them up and running. We also thought about ways to make the community energy efficient, we would add solar panels to the homes and also have a compost bin to add more nutrients to our community garden. Implementing these actions in our community will pave the path to integrating more renewable resources into the community.

The impact we wish to establish in our community is to lower our homeless population. We wish that our solution will bring our town together and be more connected. We want the view of homeless people to change. Most people see the homeless and look the other way. we want people in our community to stand up for them and help out. 

The tiny homes will rely on many different types of technology from taking biodegradable materials we use on a daily like food waste to create compost bins as well as using 3-D printers to build tiny homes and even using solar panels as one of the main energy sources for the community. We would combine all these and hopefully more in the future to make an innovative and technologically advanced tiny home community that will also have features to be energy efficient to reduce our carbon footprint throughout this project. 

Due to different factors, our solution hasn't been able to be launched just yet. When we are able to launch we are hoping to house around 15 people and help out around 65 people with other aspects of our solution such as the community garden.

The biggest barriers for us are financial, technical, time, and legal barriers. We are Highschool students so we have very limited finances only two of four have a job but work for minimum wage, and we are in lower-income households so we have no way of fully paying for the project. The technology side is hard to get a hold of as large-scale 3-D printers are difficult to get and solar panels would be an extra cost as well. As mentioned we are full-time students and athletes and have jobs so we have very limited time to work on the actual project. And finally, we would have to get land and get permits for the actual building process which is a long legal process, and very costly.  

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Our business model is to provide help to the underprivileged by giving them opportunities to better their life by providing; food, shelter, job training, clothing, mental health resources, substance abuse counseling, and volunteering oupportunities to give back to their community.   

Our path to financial stability is to apply for grants and attempt to get donations, we want to be a non-profit so we would like to get our money by not selling things so we can just help our community.