Connecting the Homeless
From left: Senior Andrew Hess, junior Myra Cheng, and Nivetha Karthikeyan (BS ’19), who together launched TechReach, a new club that uses computer science to serve community needs.
Among people who are homeless, lack of connection to family and friends poses an often-overlooked obstacle to stability and well-being.
“Homeless people haven’t just lost a roof over their heads, they’ve often lost their ties to loved ones,” says Nivetha Karthikeyan (BS ’19), who graduated from Caltech last June with a degree in computer science and history. Over the course of the past academic year, Karthikeyan worked with junior Myra Cheng and senior Andrew Hess to help address the problem by developing new technological tools for Miracle Messages, a nonprofit that helps reunite homeless people with friends and relatives.
Founded in San Francisco, Miracle Messages helps homeless individuals record video or audio messages to loved ones they have lost all contact with. Then, using as much information as the individual is able to provide, volunteers scour social media and other digital platforms to find those loved ones and deliver the message. Over the past five years, Miracle Messages has facilitated reunions for more than 200 clients who had been disconnected from their families for around 20 years, on average.
Now, the organization’s efforts will be enhanced by a database and web application developed by Karthikeyan, Cheng, and Hess, all students in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science.
The project grew out of an interest in the intersection of technology and activism, and the potential for computer science to serve as a vehicle for advancing social good. “It’s something I really want to explore: how tech interacts with society and how we can use what we learn in the classroom to solve real societal problems,” Karthikeyan says.
About a year ago, she and Cheng sent out an email to survey student interest in TechReach, a new club that would focus on using computer science to serve nonprofit and community needs. They received more than 60 interested responses.
On the advice of Claire Ralph, lecturer and director of outreach and partnerships for Caltech’s computing and mathematical sciences department, Karthikeyan and Cheng elected to launch TechReach with a pilot project.
For Cheng, the club represents an opportunity to build on similar work she had done with the volunteer organization Code for San Jose. “There are issues I care about independently of computer science,” she says. “It’s exciting to use tech skills, to write code, in a way that is impacting people.”
Hess, too, was drawn to the possibility of applying computer science to a concrete social problem: “I wanted to get real-world experience and to actually help people in a significant way.”
As their work with Miracle Messages winds down, the students hope to expand TechReach to five or six new projects involving larger numbers of computer science volunteers and a broader range of issues. They’d also like to develop connections with nonprofits serving local communities.
“Understanding the needs of the client is just as important as the technology,” Karthikeyan says. “We want to know more about the issues facing Pasadena to really figure out how our skills might help.”