Trustees’ Annual Report: Connected Homeless
Report of the trustees for the year ending 05 April 2021
OUR AIMS
Connected Homeless is a digital charity looking to assist in the fight against rough sleeping. The charity was cofounded by Sal Mohammed, an ex-Google product and partner specialist and Priya Patel a senior housing lawyer.
The charity looks to combine skillsets of both founders to build a scalable approach to tackling homelessness using technology and automating steps in the legal process when engaging with councils and support networks.
We’ve managed to build a world class technology stack over the last few years, completing unpaid work and receiving generous time from volunteers. Our platform knits together 4 bespoke pieces of technology to ensure the full ecosystem can work together to help tackle homeless in communities across the UK.
OUR OBJECTIVES
We’ve spent numerous years developing our platform and testing to ensure that our systems are robust for nationwide expansion. As a charity and small team, we’ve managed to lift over 100 people cumulatively out of homelessness in the last few years.
Our focus moving forward is not to operationalise and expand place the technology in the hands of more partner homeless organisations in order to reach more users. Our objectives can be broadly catergorised as the following:
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Activate homeless charities across the country to adopt and launch of technology in new cities.
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Strike more corporate partnerships to support the work we’re doing
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Acquire users of our donor platform in order to support rough sleepers across the country
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Scale the organisation, increasing the numbers of case workers that support our users.
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Launch partnerships with local shops nationwide to accept our payment tokens.
2020/2021 IN REVIEW
We continued to double down on our technical build. We redesigned our apps and website, making both more user friendly.
We also created a new feature yet seen before in the charity ecosystem – a feature that lets donors elect to watch ads from socially driven companies within our app which trigger advertising funds to fund the charity.
Our strong legal work continued, engaging with over 50 users, 40 of which are no longer classified as rough sleeping and are either in temporary accommodation or no longer homeless.
EXPENSES
It’s important to note that each year we receive the following in kind from pro bono benefits. This makes the charity look like our income and expenditure is dramatically lower than it overwise would be:
Product and project management support – 1 day per week @ £500 per day = £26,000
Legal support - 1.5 days per week @ £500 per day = £39,000
Tech development support - 1 hour per day @ £100 per hour = £26,000
Free bono support total: £91,000
It’s important to mention that this support is also without including the time or our regular roster of over 10 volunteers who provide technical and operational knowhow.