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Let's End Homelessness

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CONCEPT AND BACKGROUND 

The Habitat Transitional Shelters Inc  ™ is a hybrid tiny-house inspired by Fido Systems’ CEO Dan Bodner’s daily San Francisco commute past the many homeless people living in tent encampments, street alcoves, and BART-station hallways. It is intended to be a low-cost tiny house that can be quickly assembled from 8 panels including a floor panel. The panels can be stacked flat and shipped in a standard shipping container that can hold up to 12 flat-stacked Habitats™.


THE PROBLEM



SIMPLICITY IS KEY.

The initial designs do not include plumbing for toilets or kitchens. It is conceived that cooking, dining and bathroom facilities would be centralized and that several Habitats™ would be clustered around these centralized facilities. This layout greatly reduces costs and encourages a supportive social environment.


This housing concept has already been put into action both in the Cities of Oakland and San Francisco in what they term “navigation centers” and represents the current state of the art in assisting people out of homelessness. What is lacking is an affordable, easily movable and humane structure for the housing piece of this puzzle.


“The San Francisco Bay Area has the opportunity to lead the country in developing safe and easy-to-assemble interim shelter to address the growing humanitarian and public health crisis of encampments. If a shelter product like Habitat could be inexpensively produced and be made code compliant, we’d finally have an essential piece of the puzzle solved”

— Amy Farah Weiss, Founder/Director of Saint Francis Homelessness Challenge

“I'm tremendously excited about the Habitat Transitional Shelters. I've developed and operated housing with support services for homeless adults for over 25 years. Clusters of Habitat Transitional Shelters are ideal for quickly creating small-scale communities to help people by the dozen come off the street. Wrap-around supportive services then help stabilize small communities and prevent recurring homelessness among newly sheltered residents. This initiative deserves support and encouragement; we need transitional shelters urgently. We may never eliminate homelessness, but we can end it for one person, one shelter at a time.”

— Richard Heasley, Executive Director of Conard House, San Francisco


Assembly of each Habitat™ will require only two or three people with no experience and no power tools. The whole structure can be assembled with only ratchet-wrenches and a ladder in about 25 minutes.  See a time-lapse of our 3/4 scale mock-up here .



YOUR DONATION
Your donation will go toward building materials, tooling and renting of a suitable work space to evolve our scaled mock-ups into full-scale demonstration homes. We are planning a 3 month development effort to develop, build and deploy a prototype Habitat Shelter for field testing. This prototypes will be demonstrated to municipalities near us in Northern California that have already expressed an interest in our development project, and will serve as a spring-board to perfect and mass-produce the first units.  An overview of our budgeting analysis is below.

THE HABITAT TRANSITIONAL SHELTER: BASIC™

The Habitat Basic™ is 7.5' wide by 11.5' long, with a roof peak of 9’4”'. For the disabled, there is room enough for a twin or full size bed on the floor, and the doors meet accessibility codes.

The panelized design is made possible by specialized latches and receivers built into each panel. The joints are also protected by weather stripping to keep out the elements.

A full-scale corner section has been built to demonstrate the technology.

A modicum of customized furniture would complete the living setup of a Habitat™ structure. These would include a customized armoire and attached ladder, and either a bunk bed or a mountable sleeping platform for a loft bed. The setup can be completed with store-purchased small chairs, a table, and perhaps a chest of drawers.

Each unit can also be combined in several different ways to create a larger structure with minimal additional pieces.


UNITS CAN BE COMBINED IN SEVERAL CONFIGURATIONS


NAVIGATION CENTER RENDERING


A CALIFORNIA PUBLIC BENEFIT CORPORATION

Habitat Transitional Shelters Inc™  is a California Public Benefit Corporation.  Such corporations are required to include a public benefit as a key charter purpose. The assets of a public benefit corporation are irrevocably dedicated to its charitable purpose.

SUGGESTED GIVING LEVELS

Donors will be sent their thank-you gifts at the end of the campaign. Donors will also be recognized in a published newsletter at that time. 

Ally: $50-$99
• A personal Thank You from the Founders
• An opportunity to attend a speaking engagement as our guest.

Champion: $100-$249
• A personal Thank You from the Founders
• An opportunity to attend a Habitat TS speaking engagement as our guest.
• A Habitat T Shirt (please state your size)

Visionary: $250-$499
• A personal Thank You from the Founders
• An opportunity to attend a Habitat TS speaking engagement as our guest.
• A Habitat T Shirt (please state your size)
• A super-insulated metal Habitat Water Bottle

Leader's Circle: $500-$999
• A personal Thank You from the Founders
• An opportunity to attend a Habitat TS speaking engagement as our guest.
• Two Habitat T Shirts (please state your sizes)
• Two super-insulated metal Habitat Water Bottles

Founder's Circle: $1,000+
• A personal Thank You from the Founders
• An opportunity to attend a Habitat TS speaking engagement as our guest.
• Two Habitat T Shirts (please state your size)
• Two super-insulated metal Habitat Water Bottles
• Lunch with Dan Bodner and Advisory Board members.
• Photograph to appear in published acknowledgement newsletter.

Thank you so much for considering support for this worthy project.

CORPORATE SPONSORSHIP
We are currently seeking Corporate Sponsorship.  Please contact Dan Bodner ([email redacted]) if interested.

ADVISORY BOARD
We are currently seeking to add manufacturing expertise.
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Donations 

  • Anonymous
    • $100 
    • 4 yrs
  • Lainie and Hal Cohen
    • $50 (Offline)
    • 4 yrs
  • Marlene and Ike Bucher
    • $1,000 (Offline)
    • 5 yrs
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Fundraising team (2)

Dan Bodner
Organizer
Raised $5,480 from 29 donations
San Francisco, CA
carolina collazos
Team member
Raised $142 from 2 donations
This team raised $1,280 from 13 other donations.

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