Scratchpad Spotlight: Alisha Ukani on Building Civic Tech
This winter, from Jan 2nd — Jan 23rd, we piloted our Scratchpad Fellowship, which gave 5 teams of students 4 weeks, free desk space, and $200 to pilot test their teeny-tiny stage ideas. We adapted this test from Avni Patel Thompson’s Four Week Test. Here’s the reflection for our fellows on what they learned. We’ll be sharing our own reflections on our pilot in the next few weeks.
I’m Alisha, a sophomore at Harvard studying Computer Science. I applied for the Scratchpad fellowship because I’ve been working at the intersection of technology and government for a long time as a member of Code for Boston and a research assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. During my fellowship, I launched an initiative to help tenants know their rights when faced with an eviction notice.
I’m from a suburb of Boston, so for years I’ve heard about Boston’s housing crisis and record number of evictions. But before moving to Massachusetts, my family and I lived abroad. As expats, we knew we would return to the U.S., but we were never sure when, so we always rented homes. While I’m fortunate to have never faced housing instability, I understood the ability to feel at home in a rented house, while also always knowing that the home is temporary.
I decided to look into the needs of people facing eviction. My civic tech background has ingrained in me the value of doing user research to understand people’s needs. So, I started by talking to everyone I could — I talked with attorneys at multiple legal aid organizations, and visited housing court to see a mediation process and meet people who were facing evictions. This was the most exciting part of my work, since it gave me a new perspective and helped me better understand the people I wanted to help. I decided to create informational flyers to send to people who had received court summons, which would have helpful information for them to learn about their rights.
The time constraints of this four week challenge made it possible for me to work on this idea at all. A year ago, I would have laughed at the idea of working on my own startup because I imagined I would have to drop out of school, and that it would be difficult to get the resources to make real change. But four weeks was a manageable time to test out an idea, and I completely proved myself wrong; I found that it is possible to make real change and that I can balance my work with my other time commitments.
Now, I’m continuing to work on my startup by prototyping various versions of my informational flyer to ensure that I’m sending out the most important and useful information. I’ll continue doing user research to make sure that the handout communicates the information effectively. Through this work, more people will be able to stay in their homes and use the legal system to defend themselves from unjust evictions.
