So Avi Schiffmann and fellow student Marco Burstein built the website UkraineTakeShelter to help connect Ukrainian refugees to potential host families and housing, they said.
Schiffmann, 19, of Seattle, is no stranger to creating useful websites and is known for developing one of the first major COVID-19 tracking platforms — nCoV2019.live — which millions of people use, he told McClatchy News over the phone.
They “found existing efforts to connect refugees to hosts were extremely inefficient, unscalable, and hard to quickly sort through,” Schiffmann and Burstein, 18, of Los Angeles, wrote in a statement. They made their site “so that refugees in stressful situations can get the information they need as fast as possible.”
In just a matter of days, there’s already more than a thousand listings from prospective hosts in countries such as Poland, Germany, Iceland and the United States, Schiffmann told McClatchy News in a phone interview. He describes the site as an intuitive, “stripped down, specific to Ukraine, Airbnb” type platform “on steroids.”
Their website launched on March 2 and comes as more than 1.7 million Ukrainians have fled their homes after Russia attacked neighboring Ukraine in eastern Europe on Feb. 24, The Associated Press reported.
“I tried to really design the website by putting myself in the position that these refugees might be in, where they’re literally escaping a country, there’s explosions and gunfire, they’re running with their children in a foreign country, they’re lost, confused,” Schiffmann said.
The protest Schiffmann attended while currently living in San Diego, filled with signs such as “Stop Putin,” made him think of his own skills and how he could apply them “to make something that is way more directly impactful for the entire world,” he said.
The next morning, on March 1, Schiffmann contacted Burstein and they immediately got started coding the website.
They met in the fall as freshmen at Harvard.
“We did not sleep for three days,” Schiffmann said, instead taking occasional 30 minute naps to have “enough energy to keep going.”
They designed UkraineTakeShelter with a simple structure that allows host families or organizations to sign up and create a listing including details such as the country, city, how many guests, if pets are allowed, badges to advertise skills such as speaking different languages and more.
Additionally, a Ukrainian refugee seeking shelter can type in the city their nearest to on the website’s search bar to receive results of potential housing closest to them.
“I started thinking that it would be really cool to make a website to put the power back into the hands of the refugee where they’re able to take the initiative and just go into the search bar and type in their city and immediately see listings of available hosts,” Schiffmann said.
Users can also sort through potential hosts with filters that fit their needs such as whether they need child care support, legal assistance, transportation and more, he said.
For example, if a single woman fleeing Ukraine would prefer to stay with a host that’s also female, they can use a gender filter, Schiffmann explained.
There’s a “significant amount of traffic already coming from Eastern Europe,” Schiffmann said, adding that Ukrainian media outlets have begun reporting on it.
He said he’s been working with translators from around the world to ensure that the site defaults to the language of one’s phone. If a Ukrainian refugee accesses the site on their device, it’ll automatically show up in Ukrainian. He’s also worked with cybersecurity experts to help vet his website.
When asked how he’s gotten connected to translators and experts who’ve helped him, he simply pointed to Twitter and the following he’s amassed since launching his COVID-19 site.
He said he puts out tweets asking for help on topics such as cybersecurity or languages and users will respond “almost instantly,” in his direct messages.
Schiffman said it’s like “putting a bat signal out into the world,” referencing the popular superhero Batman.
He hopes more people will discover the website and hopes that anyone with connections to family in Ukraine, neighboring Poland or aid organizations to reach out to him on Twitter or by emailing ukrainetakeshelter@gmail.com.
“I really just want to get people out there to help me share the website as much as possible.”
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