SafeSpace App

SafeSpace is an app designed to help teenagers who find themselves in abusive situations by linking them to effective resources in a confidential space. 

During our school’s dress rehearsal for the 2021 Fall play, we witnessed one of our castmates sexually harass another classmate. This incident shocked us because it was the first time in our lives we confronted domestic violence. 

In response to the trauma, several students organized a series of student-led protests within our school as well as various other high schools throughout our district to protest the administration’s ineffective policies toward sexual assault on campus. Through these protests, we learned that this incident wasn’t a stand-alone experience; rather, many of our classmates and friends felt unsafe at school and feared speaking out. A few weeks afterward, advocates from LifeWire, a local domestic violence prevention organization, visited during our Health Class and gave a short workshop on technologically facilitated abuse and teen dating violence. We were staggered by the statistics on teen sexual assault. We learned that females ages 16-19 are four times more likely than the general population to be survivors of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. 

Inspired by the protests and workshops, we researched this issue further. Despite the severity of such crimes, sexual abuse remains a highly stigmatized and controversial topic, making it difficult for survivors to receive the help they need as they are often afraid to be viewed by society as “damaged” or “immoral.” Thus we created SafeSpace to address this challenge.

SafeSpace provides valuable resources to abuse survivors who will not have to fear censure or invasion of their privacy. By disseminating these resources discreetly, our goal is to begin destigmatizing the issue of sexual harassment and set the stage for meaningful and impactful public dialogue on the topic. We believe that if we had accessed a resource like SafeSpace when the catalyst incident occurred, our school community would have been better able to respond to the harassment. In this spirit, we hope that our app will help survivors in future scenarios.

SafeSpace is a confidential resource for reliable and research-based information to support those recovering from domestic and dating violence. The app’s homepage is concealed as a simple space-invaders-style game to conceal its true purpose from an outsider. From the homepage, users can access the following resources:

1. Contact a professional: This page consists of a dropdown menu with several national, statewide, and local domestic violence organizations that have agreed to partner with SafeSpace. After selecting an organization, the user is prompted to write a message that includes their first and last name, phone number, email address, and a short message regarding their situation.
2. Create a safety plan: When someone suffers domestic violence and lives in an unstable household with an abusive partner(s), they must have all their important documents readily available. SafeSpace has a section dedicated to uploading documents the user deems important.
3. Learn about Warning signs: This section educates users on types of abuse and includes a short quiz that determines whether they are in an abusive situation,
4. Access Self-care Tools: Since sexual assault is highly triggering and sensitive, this section allows users to add entries to their personalized gratitude journals, track their physical activities, or track their moods.
5. Document abuse: This section allows users to document the date and location of abusive incidents as evidence for legal situations.
6. Activate the Emergency page: Users have the option to go directly from the space-invaders “homepage” to an emergency page, which triggers the system to turn the screen black, begin audio recording, and send an emergency message to user contacts and the police.

We have a fully-functional prototype in MIT App Inventor and are working on redesigning it on Flutter Flow using our Figma wireframe. Through SafeSpace, we hope to empower survivors and provide them with the resources to heal.

While sexual assault is an issue that anyone can face (regardless of age, demographic, or gender identity) teenagers are especially at risk due to the social stigma associated with abuse and the lack of resources available to them. According to The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey in 2015, about one in four victims of completed or attempted rape first experienced it between the ages of 11 and 18. Abuse can lead to failing grades, low self-esteem, and psychological trauma. The best way to stop relationship abuse is to recognize the signs and take action if abuse is suspected. 

Many teenagers have not matured enough to the extent to which they understand vulnerability and abuse. When we looked for the reasons why young people didn’t go to a prevention center or a trusted adult, we found that some teens think that what they’re experiencing is normal, while others may fear their lives could be in danger if they try to leave the abusive situation. We believe an app would be an effective way to help survivors because teens are accustomed to navigating online resources and current research from Cornell University shows that technology is an effective mode of delivering mental health services. We are working with several teen-oriented organizations to brainstorm ways we can refine SafeSpace for youth appeal, including a gratitude journal, a mood tracker, a music feature, and a pedometer. 

SafeSpace’s team is strategically designed to incorporate members with diverse skill sets and capabilities. Two teens co-founded and developed the SafeSpace app, with the guidance of two adult mentors who have provided avenues for community outreach. Since both the founders are young, we can predict and understand our peers and the overall lack of trust they may feel toward adult figures. Further, our personal experience of witnessing an assault on our school campus gives us an inside perspective on the issue facing young people and the approach that should be implemented to address this critical problem.

Though we share several similar experiences, both of us have different expertise: Ananya Aatreya is focused on developing the app and assumes leadership in structuring and organizing our nonprofit. She has extensive knowledge of coding both Python and Java Scripts as well as app development through her experience leading workshops in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
Gauri Gupta is responsible for the app’s business plan, community engagement, grant applications, and outreach to domestic violence organizations. She draws on her experience in Canva, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and Filmora to conduct promotional marketing and social media outreach. Through our diverse skill sets, we have been able to effectively collaborate on SafeSpace and divide tasks to maximize our potential.
Our mentors include Karina Tamayo and Ward Urion. Karina Tamayo is an advocate at LifeWire, who offered valuable guidance on conducting community outreach. With her assistance,  we conducted a tech-safety workshop at UW Bothell University, published a podcast with LifeWire, and served as keynote speakers at LifeWire’s 40th Anniversary Gala. Our second advisor, Ward Urion, is an advocate at the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (WSCADV). Through him, we received a fiscal sponsorship, establishing SafeSpace as a formidable organization in our community. Through his connections, we spoke at WSCADV’s statewide membership conference and as key panelists in a Facebook Live event. Under his mentorship, we also serve on the Youth Advisory Committee to discuss these pressing issues and how we can create effective support systems for young people. Through the help of our mentors and our skills, we feel we are well-equipped to develop SafeSpace into a formidable organization that empowers teenagers to heal from and support each other through traumatic experiences.

Our anticipated improvement to the community is to raise awareness of best practices in education, safety, reporting, and advocacy to fight sexual harassment and assault by leading workshops and presentations geared toward teenagers. Therefore, our activities primarily consist of community outreach with established sexual assault organizations (both on the local King County level as well as statewide) and participation in community programs throughout the year. We are currently connected with 10+ domestic violence organizations throughout the state, notably the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (WSCADV), LifeWire, and GirlUp. With these organizations (both virtually and in-person), we can partner effectively to widen the impact of our community outreach and awareness events.

Our first avenue to build awareness is through workshops and presentations. We designed an interactive workshop about technological-facilitated abuse and designed a game to simulate the toxicity of the internet and how easily unwanted information can spread. Our initial experiences hosting this workshop were at New Beginning’s youth retreat and the University of Washington Bothell. We have received overwhelmingly positive feedback,

A second avenue of community outreach is through social media and internet platforms, as we believed we would be able to reach many teens through virtual platforms. WSCADV invited us to speak as key panelists in a Facebook Live event in honor of Domestic Violence Prevention month. We had the honor of speaking alongside the founder of Gender-Oriented Violence Activism and Advocacy (GOVAA) and several preventionists from WSCADV. We discussed tech safety, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Shortly after, we recorded a 30-min podcast episode with our mentor Karina Tamayo to create a collaborative podcast episode with LifeWire and UW Bothell called Technically Speaking. This podcast series provides UW college students with resources to encourage self-love and foster healthy relationships. Our episode, "Staying Safe Online", focused on SafeSpace and the toxicity of social media for young people. Our team met Agape Garcia, the founder of the nonprofit organization "Confronting Domestic Violence," at a networking event. She invited us to speak on her television show, which is streamed on eight different platforms (Roku, Amazon TV, Apple, etc.). We discussed our work and the prevalence of teen dating violence in high schools. Through all the community initiatives we participated in, we were able to spread awareness through a variety of platforms and engage the community to have more thoughtful discussions regarding this issue.

We are also working directly with teens in our high school and other youth programs. As presidents of the GirlUp chapter at our school, we hosted a schoolwide fundraiser during Dating Violence Awareness month; all proceeds were donated to LifeWire and WSCADV. We also presented SafeSpace to the counseling department at our school and plan to meet with the superintendent of the district in hopes of adding SafeSpace to a published list of resources available to students. Our team has presented SafeSpace’s project to the Bellevue Youth Council, where 100+ teenagers from our community offered feedback so that we could gauge interest. We were overwhelmed by this audience’s commitment, as the majority of them agreed to help with beta testing, marketing, and outreach. The positive feedback we received is motivation as we continue to develop SafeSpace and open our app to its intended audience.

Through all our community outreach, we have received a $1000 grant from the United Nations Foundation in collaboration with GirlUp due to our commitment to combat gender-based violence within the community. We even received a $5000 grant from the Bellevue Rotary Club due to our mission to involve Bellevue youth in SafeSpace's work.

Through these three primary avenues, we hope to establish SafeSpace as a formidable resource within the community and create an environment where youth are comfortable discussing these topics and sharing their experiences. 

Victims of domestic and sexual violence are often under immense pressure and scrutiny, so we want them to safely access our app.  Using an innovative backdoor mechanism called "pattern-based" authentication, we have bundled SafeSpace inside other common apps like games, news apps, etc. The access to SafeSpace from the other app is controlled by an authentication mechanism that is both easy and quick for the actual user, while also extremely innocuous to a casual observer. 

The authentication is based on a pattern that the user can configure in multiple ways: triggering a certain event in the space game, like clicking on a widget a certain number of times or triggering some class of events; entering the wrong password a specific number of times; using a different set of passwords in the space game that would lead users either to a game or SafeSpace. The exact mechanism is less critical and in fact, there could be multiple ways employed depending on user preference. Once in SafeSpace users would also have single-click access back to the space app. This would allow users to safely access and use SafeSpace and toggle back to the space app immediately when necessary.

We also plan to build the Application Programming Interface (API) and a  platform to allow other apps to easily onboard the backdoor for accessing SafeSpace. The API/platform would be generic so that any two apps can be bundled together in the same way we described above. This generic platform is essential to ensure that the app will help abuse victims through numerous avenues.

We have four specific impact goals our team plans on achieving in the upcoming year:

Goal #1: Mobilize teenagers to participate so that they are actively aware of the prevalence of this issue and can fulfill their roles in mitigating sexual violence within the community.

Solution #1: Planning and executing a school-wide event with Interlake High School’s Gender-Oriented Violence Activism and Advocacy Club to raise funds, create posters. and generate advertising materials.

Goal #2: Polish SafeSpace's UX and have it available for consumer use by the middle of 2023.

Solution #2: Partner with nonprofit coding organizations, such as Opportunity Hack and Code for the Dream, so our team can work collaboratively with volunteer developers to advance SafeSpace to a functional app for beta testing

Goal #3: Provide teenagers with the resources necessary to protect themselves and others from sexual assault.

Solution #3: SafeSpace allows anyone to access educational, protective, and functional resources at their disposal without fear of discovery.

Goal #4: Establish SafeSpace as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization

Solution #4: On the road to becoming an independent 501(c)(3), our team will first receive fiscal sponsorship from a local domestic violence organization. This allows us to offer tax-break incentives for individuals who donate to SafeSpace.

SafeSpace’s plan of action is divided into three phases: prevention, intervention, and recovery. During the prevention phase, we plan to educate teenagers on dating and domestic violence through workshops and presentations. We will measure our success by the number of community-related events we lead and how many domestic violence organizations help with our cause. In the intervention phase, we want to empower and support survivors by connecting them with confidential resources available through our app. We will measure our success by the number of users who download and actively use SafeSpace. In the recovery phase, we want to create a culture of activism in the community by empowering students to report incidents of abuse, especially those in schools. We will measure our success by the changes in policies and resources available to student survivors. Through these phases, we hope to begin productive dialogues on this highly-stigmatized issue as well as protect and heal survivors.

We initially made a prototype of our app on MIT App Inventor, a block coding platform. This viable product had full functionality and all the screens we wanted in our first version, but it also had several drawbacks. For example, the Firebase integration was far from perfect. We used Firebase to encrypt and store data in the app, but MIT App Inventor's Firebase plugin tended to glitch when we used it. We decided to remake the entire app on an IDE called Flutter, so we could create an app that had both a responsive design and the ability to run on any device we wanted. The first step was redesigning the screens on software called Figma, which is a no-code website-design platform. We later ported the designs to another site called Flutterflow, which helped us finetune our screens. From there, we were able to directly port the code for the front end of our app to Flutter. We also received feedback from several organizations, like the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center, to add specific features. Our plans for the future include implementing a possible AI chatbot and a locator for nearby shelters.

While our solution hasn't been officially launched, we plan to serve at least 1,200 people in the coming year. This number is a conservative estimate based on partnerships in discussion with our community.  We are already teamed up with the Bellevue City Council and intend to launch a beta testing campaign with their support to ensure our app is user ready. Using google forms to gauge interest, we have approximately 75 youth who have volunteered for beta testing through previous outreach efforts and approximately five organizations who are willing to promote SafeSpace once it is officially launched.

Also, we hope to soon be among the resources listed by the local school district (a population of 7,000). The level of interest in the project grows with each presentation we give, assuring us that community members also see the need for our solution. According to statistics from US News, about a quarter of high schoolers in relationships report facing some variation of online abuse. Each case of abuse has ripple effects among teens because friends, classmates, and siblings may be tangentially impacted by abusive relationships. We intend to tailor our app to not just the victim, but those supporting him or her. It is in reaching this wide audience of survivors and supporters who we plan to serve. 

The major barriers that may limit our team’s impact in the next year fall under the following categories: cultural, technical, legal, and safety. A disturbing part about abuse targeting teenagers is that the survivors often think their situations are normal due to inadequate access to information that tells them otherwise. Although there are nonprofits that hold workshops in schools on abusive behaviors, teenagers sometimes receive conflicting messages from their peers or some media that stalking or physical abuse are either to be expected or maybe romantic. This is the biggest cultural barrier we face, in addition to the stigma that accompanies sensitive topics such as domestic violence or sexual assault. We plan on addressing this by marketing SafeSpace as a concealed resource by emphasizing that it has several mechanisms to ensure privacy (emergency escape functions and a concealed homepage). These features should promote a sense of safety for users. 

A technical barrier is figuring out a way to secure the app so that it cannot be easily hacked. We plan on addressing this through research, collaboration with mentors, and input from experts in advocacy and technology. These steps will further our understanding of what to expect and how to handle challenges. 

A legal barrier is that our app has features to document abuse, but how much of this is legal depends on the state. We plan on addressing this before launching SafeSpace for public use by consulting an attorney. By asking an expert for legal guidance, we can avoid legal challenges for the app and its users.

A safety barrier is that users may have privacy concerns and feel uncomfortable recording their personal experiences, especially in the Document Abuse and Safety Plan section. We will address this by implementing a multiple-entry password, where one password leads to a decoy while another password leads to the app, without compromising the safety of the user's privacy. This feature will ensure that any users will be safe from abusive partners and intrusive monitoring. This will also prevent any data leaks. 

We plan on addressing the above concerns before launching SafeSpace for public use by beta-testing all features of the app with students in our school as well as the Bellevue Youth Council. There is no substitute for the hard work of polishing and troubleshooting the product thoroughly before releasing it to the general public. In this way, we can ensure positive and fluid experiences for early users of the product. 

Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (WSCADV): WSCADV is a nonprofit organization that serves as a resource for programs that assist domestic violence survivors and their families. Our team held a panel at the annual, statewide WSCADV Membership Conference, an opportunity for preventions throughout Washington state to convene and discuss prevalent issues and implement plans for the upcoming year. This experience allowed our team to share our app with possible organizations that are interested in our cause and would help launch SafeSpace in the community. We were approached by representatives from several organizations afterward to exchange contact information. Further, the WSCADV team is willing to have a meeting with us to brainstorm ideas for content and technical support. 

On a second occasion, WSCADV invited us to speak as panelists in a Facebook Live event for Domestic Violence Prevention month. Our team had the honor of speaking alongside the founder of Gender-Oriented Violence Activism and Advocacy (GOVAA) and several preventionists from WSCADV. In the panel, our team discussed tech safety, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Our team also discussed our work with SafeSpace and the community outreach our team has accomplished.

LifeWire: SafeSpace has partnered with LifeWire, which is a local nonprofit organization aiming to help survivors of domestic violence, and received valuable technical support to include features that would be most useful for survivors. LifeWire celebrated 40 years of operations at a special gala, and our team was offered time to present our app to attendees; we addressed the issue of technology-facilitated abuse amongst teens and how listeners could assist our team. 
Our mentor Karina Tamayo works closely with mental health advocates at UW Bothell, with whom our team collaboratively hosted a tech-safety workshop on the implications of technological-facilitated abuse and its impacts. Speakers engaged in a meaningful dialogue with the participants and collected contact info from those willing to help with SafeSpace community outreach.
These opportunities allowed our team to share our project with our target audiences and build connections with meaningful organizations dedicated to this cause. 

Confronting Domestic Violence: Agape Garcia, the founder of the nonprofit organization "Confronting Domestic Violence," invited SafeSpace’s creators to speak on her TV Show, which is streamed on eight different platforms, including Roku, Amazon TV, Apple, and others. During the interview,  we discussed the SafeSpace app and teen dating violence in high schools. Following this successful collaboration, we are now closely affiliated with this non-profit and are helping with its outreach and marketing.

New Beginnings: New Beginnings Youth Retreat is focused on building awareness around technological-facilitated abuse among teens and methods of prevention. An invitation to present at this event allowed our team to make direct contact with our target audience and reach many who are willing to serve as volunteers to beta-test SafeSpace and provide us with valuable feedback.

Bellevue City Government: We are members of the executive committee for Bellevue Youth Council (BYC), which is a city-oriented program for high schoolers to take leadership initiatives within the community. Our team works alongside City Representative Patrick Alina and gave a presentation on the necessity of increasing for high school students to speak up over these traumatic issues. As part of this collaboration, we created an action team to get more youth involved in SafeSpace's mission. We sent out a feedback form and over 75 teenagers stated their interest in helping with beta testing, marketing, and outreach.

Gender-Oriented Violence Activism and Advocacy (GOVAA): We serve as co-presidents of the GOVAA chapter in our school and have offered SafeSpace as a viable resource for its members. We conduct weekly club meetings to discuss issues ranging from mental health, healthy relationships, and consent to sexual assault. In this role, we've coordinated with local Domestic Violence organizations to present at service-club meetings in our community and offered volunteer opportunities for members. We collaboratively led a schoolwide fundraiser during Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October and raised over $5,000, which was donated to WSCADV and LifeWire.

GirlUp Club: We work alongside five other officers to lead 30+ members in learning more about women’s rights issues and how to support this cause. As a club, we collaborated with local DV organizations, such as LifeWire and King County Sexual Assault Resources, to work on service projects, including hygiene kits and food cans. Similar to our work with GOVAA, we led a school-wide fundraiser where we raised $1500+ and donated all the proceeds to LifeWire.

As a nonprofit organization, our company will reinvest any donations received to local sexual assault-prevention organizations, such as LifeWire and WSCADV. SafeSpace is directed by the owners, Gauri Gupta and Ananya Aatreya, who do not receive a salary for their efforts. We have extensive experience in programming, app design, market research, and business management. As a result, we act as the primary software developers and marketers, negating the need to pay for technical services. 

Given that younger people are at greater risk of abuse, we expect school and college students to benefit most from our app and, therefore, be our largest user group. The app will be available free of cost to users, and, due to the sensitive nature of our content, we believe that any advertising in the app would degrade users’ experiences. Therefore, all funding sources, by necessity, will be external.

Parents, schools, college administrators, and non-profit organizations that work to help abuse victims would be advocates for and users of our app as well. We plan to make our app available for download on our website, the App Store, and Play Store and conduct workshops and participate in conferences to raise awareness about our app. One of the contacts we made even suggested that due to the critical problem that our app addresses, they would be willing to help us make Bellevue School District require all its students to download and sign-up with the app. We plan to build a feedback form In our app, and through this explicit feedback, we will continue to add features and make improvements to the app. Through this business model, SafeSpace’s goal is to provide value to teenagers and make the app accessible to those who need it. 

SafeSpace has five main costs to consider:

1. Flutter Flow Subscription ($30/month)

2. Firebase Subscription ($0.12/GB)

3. Filing for a Provisional Patent ($1500/one-time)

4. App Developer ($500/3 months)

5. Marketing + Promotional Costs ($500/quarterly)

Since SafeSpace is a nonprofit organization, our path to financial stability consists of receiving sustainable grants from reputable organizations. We are not implementing any in-app advertising because we want to make SafeSpace as effective and respectful as possible to provide quality service in times of emergency. We are relying on grants from local, state, and federal governments, the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, and charitable organizations. 

We have received quite a bit of interest from established organizations to provide us funding to head start our project. Since SafeSpace’s mission closely aligns with the United Nation’s 5th Sustainability Goal of Gender Equality, we were awarded a $1000 grant to continue SafeSpace’s mission to combat gender-based violence within the community. Furthermore, our close connection with Bellevue's city government paved the way for a $5,000 grant from the Bellevue Rotary Club, based on SafeSpace's strong mission to improve the community and empower Bellevue’s youth. Additionally, we received a $300 stipend for participating in the WSCADV Facebook Live Event in October for Domestic Violence Awareness month, where we discussed technological-facilitated abuse and the stigmatization of sexual assault among teenagers. 

In addition, long-term if needed we can also open our platform for corporations to integrate with our app, and in turn a new revenue source for us. Companies that build games or news portals can integrate with our app and benefit in the following two ways: they would get more views for their apps; visible support for this worthy cause would be a good public relations exercise by sending a strong signal to customers and stakeholders that the organizations oppose all types of abuse.

Below are other income streams and credits that help with expenses:

1. Google Ad Grant

What is it: Google ad credit to help boost marketing efforts for nonprofit organizations.

Potential benefits: Up to $10,000 of in-kind advertising every month, which can be used to recruit volunteers and increase donations.

1. Google for Nonprofits

What is it: Instead of a traditional grant, Google for Nonprofits offers products and tools to help nonprofit organizations run their operations.

Potential benefits: Access to G Suite for Nonprofits, Google Ad Grants, YouTube Nonprofit Program, and Google Maps Platform for free. Nonprofit organizations receive significant discounts on G Suite Business and Enterprise Software.

1. Grants to USA Nonprofits, Groups, and Coalitions for Social Justice Projects

What is it: NGO grants up to $10,000 and grants of up to $20,000 to USA and territories nonprofit organizations, groups, and coalitions for social justice activities and projects. The funding is intended for programs that focus on direct action and community organization.

Potential benefits: Full access to archived grants and the ability to create a Partial Grant Calendar. Furthermore, it offers full details on all the current grants on Grant Watch and information needed to apply for grants and awards.

Through these financial streams, we hope to sustain SafeSpace, promote its mission, expand our vision, and help as many teens and their advocates as possible.