Aidez

A sense of belonging in a community is a feeling that a person has that they matter to one another due to their shared beliefs and their needs are being met by being together. These community connections tend to be fluid in particular community groups due to the lack of access to social, emotional, and physical support that they desire to have. These groups are older adults, recent immigrants, international students, working couples, people with disabilities, and single parents. The reasons behind those missing social connections are mainly psychosocial, language barriers, introversion in nature to ask for help, and lack of a systematic way to get that needed support. Due to the nature of required assistance, most existing social support groups do not support it as they are more focused on work, legal, housing, or other urgent matters. These required assistances could be in the form of someone to talk to reduce their social isolation, get acquainted with locals and the system to integrate well into the society, or simple errands like assisting in getting groceries along with yours and accompanying for a routine clinical visit. On the other hand, we have volunteers looking for opportunities to give back to society.

Aidez is a technology-based platform that acts as a catalyst for engaging in the community and increasing the sense of belonging. The platform is a two-sided network; people in need of non-emergency help are at one side of the network (users) and people who offer support (volunteers). The volunteers can provide this support alongside their tasks or purposefully. For the volunteers, it is an aggregated platform designed to browse through and choose an opportunity that suits their time, location, skills, and passion. The target users of the platform are international students, older adults, people with disability, newcomers to the place, recent immigrants, working couples, and single mothers and fathers. Tapping into the empathetic feelings of people, Aidez bridges the gap between help-seekers and help-providers of the platform. ‘Sense of living by giving,’ the platform’s motto, reinforces the thought behind it.  Thus, the vision of our platform is to create a sense of giving, sense of being, sense of a part of the community, tighten the relationship between people in their neighborhood, and become a measurable recognition of the contribution to society.

Elderly, people with disabilities, and Immigrants

Subburaj Karupppasamy

-10+ years of research experience on healthy aging and community development for the elderly

PhD. in Design Engineering

Dzung Nguyen

§5+ years of experience in Mgt. consulting, digitalization, and project management in various countries

-B.S. in International management 

Yes, we are aiming to develop our MVP (manual mapping and connecting) into a full-fledged mobile application with speech recognition (non-smart phone users), automated matching based on the neighborhood, type of request, and also use NLP to interpret the request and offer. We are partnering up with University (SMU and Dal) to get the volunteers now. We are aiming to partner-up with NGO and Religious org to get more users and volunteers. Solve would provide the needed visibility and resource to implement the solution in Halifax and then NS before expanding to entire North America. 

• First system connecting folks in need of help with folks who are available to offer their time 
• Gamified system that rewards for offering help and creating a sense of community
• Healthy Competition for greater public good and make Halifax a livable city for everyone
• Get recognized for societal contribution and build social capital

211 Canada couldn't solve at least 12% of the requests related to day-to-day activities of elderly and people with disabilities. So we aim to tackle this issue first as it is evident and we have access to them immediately. 211 receives at least 36000 calls in 2021.

No of users (help seekers) and volunteers 

Paid consumers

People are social and empathetic. So we aim to make to let the emotion and availblity to do micor-volunteering activity to conenct. 

Matching requests to volunteer (mobile app)

We both are coming from two different countries (India and Vietnam) and we hire right person for the right job. 

Paid Ads and Subscription