{"id":116479,"date":"2020-05-02T02:05:39","date_gmt":"2020-05-02T02:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/news\/?id=2zjvl2ig"},"modified":"2020-05-02T02:05:39","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T02:05:39","slug":"meet-the-developer-shelley-taylor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/05\/02\/meet-the-developer-shelley-taylor\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the developer: Shelley Taylor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n

RefAid supports migrants around the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In 2015, a 3-year-old Syrian boy named Aylan Kurdi drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe with his family. The image of his body washed up on a beach in Lebanon devastated American startup veteran Shelley Taylor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese migrants are coming into Europe, they get here, and they don\u2019t know how to find the basic things\u2014the supermarket, shelter, the doctor,\u201d says Taylor, CEO of Trellyz, which creates software for cities and nonprofits. \u201cAnd I thought, they all have smartphones, maybe I can create something that will let them find what they need when they need it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Over a weekend she built RefAid\u2014Refugee Aid App<\/em> and launched it in the UK and Italy in February 2016. The app catalogs aid organizations\u2019 services for migrants and refugees seeking to build a new life in Europe and, increasingly, the United States.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The app reduces its language barrier with icons in addition to words.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

These days, the app is evolving from one designed to meet the basic daily survival needs of refugees to one able to tackle the many challenges of the mounting migrant crisis at the U.S. border and provide information during COVID-19.<\/p>\n

Services have been added to address family separation, offering constantly updated intel about legal aid as well as geo-targeted push notifications with crucial on-the-ground information. For example, RefAid might send an alert with a phone number for free legal help in an area where migrants are being rounded up.<\/p>\n

The app (which is now available in 25 countries, with some 5,000 aid organizations contributing) will soon include services in most U.S. states. Taylor and her team are constantly reaching out to more nonprofits and public service providers to include them in the app. Through a web-based content management system, they can manage and update their offerings and communicate directly with people.<\/p>\n

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These migrants are coming into Europe, they get here, and they don\u2019t know how to find the basic things\u2014the supermarket, shelter, the doctor.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Available in English, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, and soon French, the app directs refugees (using geolocation) to aid within a 100-mile radius. The services are sorted by categories like legal, food, education, work, media, faith groups, psychological, and more.<\/p>\n

Solving one problem at a time<\/h3>\n

Before launching RefAid, Taylor\u2014who was raised in Palo Alto, California, but lives in Europe\u2014needed to contact aid organizations and have them provide a list of services that could help migrants in need. She started with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the British Red Cross but quickly ran into a roadblock: Most of them didn\u2019t readily know all of the services they provided.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The worldwide refugee crisis broke Shelley Taylor\u2019s heart\u2014so she made an app to help.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Taylor waited weeks for aid groups to get back to her. \u201cWe called them and said, \u2018Did you change your mind? Where are your services? We just need a little spreadsheet.\u2019\u201d And they said, uniformly, \u2018Oh, we have to call each of the offices to ask them because nothing is written down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, Taylor created what may be the first global database of nonprofit services. She doesn\u2019t charge the organizations to use the app, covering the development and operating costs herself. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want anyone to have an excuse to say no to putting their services on the app, because it\u2019s such a huge problem and people really need help.\u201d <\/p>\n

Help finding help<\/h3>\n

Although RefAid doesn\u2019t have the capacity to respond to real-time updates from refugees and migrants, Taylor has anticipated the needs of people arriving by either land or sea. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you come into Greece, for example, the organizations don\u2019t have the right to go to the beach directly. They have to stay in their offices \u2014 that\u2019s the law. But, if somebody has told migrants to look at the app, those migrants can discover that around the corner there\u2019s a Red Cross office and food vouchers, which they couldn\u2019t have found otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Taylor in the French town of Calais, home to the notorious Calais Jungle refugee encampment where some 10,000 refugees sought shelter from 2015 to 2016.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The app is used primarily in the U.S., the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, and Greece. After the first attempted U.S. travel ban in January 2017, RefAid quickly deployed in 19 American cities, cataloging legal services nearby for those trapped at U.S. airports. In May 2018, 40 other cities\u2014including Oslo, Athens, and Amsterdam\u2014began listing their services. <\/p>\n

During the current U.S. migrant crisis, new services from different aid organizations are being added daily. Some large resettlement organizations in the U.S., such as the International Refugee Committee, have actually started preloading cell phones with the RefAid app and giving them to migrants.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s exciting to see how it\u2019s growing,\u201d Taylor says, \u201cbut we still haven\u2019t mapped the whole world. And that\u2019s our goal: to map all of the services available to refugees and everyone else in the whole world. It\u2019s just a step at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally published on the App Store.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RefAid supports migrants around the world. In 2015, a 3-year-old Syrian boy named Aylan Kurdi drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe with his family. The image of his body washed up on a beach in Lebanon devastated American startup veteran Shelley Taylor. \u201cThese migrants are coming into Europe, they get here, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apple-developer-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}