CS+Social Good Stories: Ethan Brown, 2017 Fellow
Welcome to the second installment of CS+Social Good Stories, a Medium series by Stanford CS+Social Good to spotlight members of the CS+Social Good community. Today, we feature a reflection written by Ethan Brown ’19 on his summer in Denmark working at Venligboerne, a grassroots organization that supports refugees by matching individuals to local resources.
This summer, I went to Denmark with two other students to create an app for an organization there called Venligboerne, a grassroots organization that focuses on helping refugees and others who are entering Denmark feel at home in their new country, helping them integrate through anything from offering to get coffee to offering legal advice to helping them find a job or a house. The app helps centralize their organization consisting of over 150,000 people and provides one place for people to be offer and receive friendly actions.
Immediately, once we stepped off the plane, we were greeted by a 6’10” man named Kristian who was volunteering for Venligboerne. He showed us where our house was and stayed with us for the first two weeks to help us become accustomed to Danish culture. As we met more Venligboerne volunteers, we felt more and more welcomed, as they made us coffee, dinner, and encouraged us to hang out with them as much as we wanted.
Creating a sustainable solution
Going into this summer, we knew little about what Venligboerne actually needed and what would benefit them. Would they actually need an app? What features would an app have in order to benefit them most? These were the questions we were pondering when we arrived in Denmark. When we arrived, we spent the first week talking with members of the organization and learning more about what they do. We talked to as many people as possible in order to figure out what would most benefit them. One issue we found is that there are over 100 Facebook groups, and so people were overwhelmed by the number of places they had to look for information. Next, the leaders of Venligboerne wanted the Facebook groups to be reserved for stories, rather than logistical posts about advice or free things. Finally, while many people want to be involved and help out, it was intimidating for many people to post in a Facebook group of up to 50,000 people, so these people wouldn’t know where to contribute.
Our app addressed all of these issues, by providing a centralized place for Venligboerne to post and providing a foot in the door for those looking to make a small impact on the community. Only time will tell how the app will be used, but we believe it will help them greatly.
As for the technical aspect of the project, we had never coded an app before, so it took us a while to learn about the potential frameworks, languages, and databases. In the end, we used Expo, which is a framework built on top of React Native, with Firebase as our Database and Heroku as a server. We learned so much throughout the process and ultimately coded something that can help the organization greatly. It’s on the app stores!
A note of thanks
I know it’s really difficult to send more than one person on a fellowship, but I truly think that it enhanced the experience to have multiple people working on the same project. We never felt isolated by being in a foreign place for so long, and it was a great experience to be working and living together for the entire summer.
Thank you to CS+Social Good for sending me on this journey this summer — it was the best summer of my life!
