On Tuesday we hosted our first ‘Raising Bee‘ workathon – an event for digital folk to volunteer to work together on a regular basis, on features requested through the Manchester Homelessness Charter action groups.

The idea emerged from the recent HomelessHack event – we know there are lots of people with really useful skills who care about this issue and want to do something to help. By making a regular commitment to working together on things that have been requested by frontline organisations and people experiencing homelessness, we can make a positive impact, and build a community in the process.

With an open mind to how this might work, we kicked off with the first event this week, kindly hosted by CodeComputerlove in their office (thank you!). We had a good mix of developers with different skills, aswell as product owners, a content writer and a UI designer.

After some background context to homelessness in Manchester, and an overview of what’s already happening around the partnership, on streetsupport.net and beyond, we jumped into the detail. Those with technical skills got set up and started to look at tickets, while others talked about how best to manage the work considering a large number of people working on a temporary/ad hoc basis.

It is early days, but signs are promising. There was great energy in the room, with many staying until after 9pm and wanting to come again to the next event. We will run the events once a month, and hope that people might also choose to work on the solution either on their own or in groups between events.

The next event is on 10th October 5.30-9.30pm. We hope to see you there 🙂

We welcome more developers, creatives and communications people to come along and get involved. If you know someone with useful skills who may be interested, please invite them along.

If you have any questions, please get in touch at info@streetsupport.net.

#EndHomelessnessMCR