To all our wonderful supporters,

A December Update from Urban Refuge

Thank you to all of our supporters, who have been patiently waiting this month for our most exciting update yet! As our Crowdfunding campaign drew to an end this year, we partnered with a private sector tech partner to actually build the app. Throughout the Crowdfunding campaign, we worked with a private sector tech company to translate our idea of an app to reality. 

We are thrilled to announce that we are ready to launch our app Urban Refuge in partnership with Microsoft New England!​ 

James Sturtevant, a Microsoft Technology Evangelist, worked with members of the Urban Refuge team to develop the initial technology for the app. In the late summer of 2016, members from Urban Refuge visited Microsoft New England to review the app design and user interface.

In just a matter of weeks, James was able to fully build Urban Refuge version 1.0! The app is prepared to accommodate our finished database of organizations and we will be training our teams on the ground in Amman, Jordan, in January of 2017. The first week of the month, Urban Refuge team members Prof. Noora Lori, Vicky Kelberer, and Michelle Abou-Raad will travel to Amman to set up the beta test.

Team members Prof. Noora Lori, Vicky, and Kate Skow were interviewed alongside James from Microsoft for Dev Radio about building the app and the technological considerations involved. Please find the full interview here!

In related news, members of the Urban Refuge team participated in a hackathon on Friday, December 2nd with the Fall 2016 IR 500 Forced Migration & Human Trafficking class, who are developing digital solutions for issues of forced migration. Their class is dedicated to developing a solution for NGOs who track unaccompanied minors at risk for human trafficking in Europe. 

A huge thank you to James and the team at Microsoft New England for their invaluable support! Because they developed all of the technology pro bono for Urban Refuge, we are able to use the funds raised through our Crowdfunding budget to further improve our tech and propel our launch forward in 2017!

Stay tuned for more exciting updates in the weeks to come!

A huge THANK YOU from the entire Urban Refuge team for all of your support of our project. Thanks to you, we not only met our goal of $15,000 to launch in Amman, we surpassed it by nearly $3,000! We are so excited that we now have the resources we need to launch in Amman this year, and we also have a few (now secret) updates to share with our generous supporters that we know you'll love to hear.

We're meeting as a board next week to set our final budget and share our next steps and news with you all. Please stay tuned to this page for important updates as we move swiftly to launch, and thank you once again for standing with refugees and Urban Refuge. Until then, please remember to like us on Facebook for even more updates and interesting articles about refugees. 

Cue music!

Now that we have set the  musical tone, we are in the final week of our Crowdfunding campaign for Urban Refuge. We are all so excited to have passed the $10,000 mark this week!! If we surpass our goal of $15,000 for the technology, outreach, and research for the app, we will use any additional funds to cover the legal fees to make sure that our app is in line with Jordanian standards, and to conduct our market testing when the app launches.Every dollar will go towards a great cause - helping Syrian refugees in Jordan - and the UN Summit on Refugees taking place right now is an important reminder of how much help is needed.

Tonight, the Urban Refuge team met for our September staff meeting. We discussed our strategies for our budgets, our technology, our outreach, and our launch. We also talked about our long-term goal of becoming an independent NGO rather than a student group, a goal you have all helped to put within our reach! We are looking at Urban Refuge's expansion beyond Amman already, and are hoping to expand to the rest of Jordan swiftly following the test phase in Amman.

On that note: please help us reach our goal of $15,000 in this last week of fundraising! Thank you to all of you who have donated so far for making this app come off the drawing board and into the real world.

We have so many exciting updates to share when the campaign draws to a close, and can't wait to show you all our app as it launches in Amman this year! 

To all of our generous donors, THANK YOU for bringing us so close to our goal! We have a little over a week left to hit our Crowdfunding goal. If we are able to raise just under $900 more to hit $9,750, an anonymous donor has offered us a matching gift of $5,000. Please consider donating to Urban Refuge today!

An anonymous donor just offered to make a matching gift of $5,000 to the Urban Refuge project - IF we are able to reach $9,750 by September 25th! We only have 12 days left to go in our campaign, and we need YOUR help. Please consider donating to Urban Refuge today, and help us get our app to the refugees who need it in Jordan. We are so grateful for all of the support our community has already given us, and with just a small push we will be well on our way to meeting our goal of $15,000 thanks to the generosity of our donors.

Thank you all for supporting Urban Refuge! Help us to put aid on the map in Jordan!

Urban Refuge is so excited that we are now more than 50 percent towards our goal of raising $15,000! Our team could not be more grateful to our incredible donors, who are pushing us closer to launching Urban Refuge in Amman this year.

As Boston University resumed its classes this week, BU Today published a story by team member Vicky Kelberer about the process of creating the Urban Refuge App. Check it out to hear more about how Urban Refuge came to be, and consider supporting us as we work towards bringing our app to Syrian refugees in Jordan!

Team members from Urban Refuge met this Monday to talk about our strategy to launch the Urban Refuge app in Amman this fall! Members attended the meeting at Boston University both in person and via Skype. During the meeting, we all talked about how excited we are that so many donors have already supported our project. We think we can get to $4,000 by the end of the week... but we need your help!

Support our project today and help get Urban Refuge to our users, Syrian refugees living in Jordan. To our donors who have already joined our project, a sincere thank you from the entire team for making this app a reality. Every bit counts! Let's get out the word and get Urban Refuge up and running today!