JustFix.nyc

Introduction

During the summer of 2019, I worked for JustFix.nyc through the Cardinal Quarter Urban Summer Fellowship. I received a stipend and mentoring to pursue an internship at a non-profit whose mission I was passionate about.

JustFix.nyc is a housing justice non-profit that builds technology to support tenants and tenant organizers in New York City. As my main project, I created the Eviction Free NYC Text Bot, an automated SMS messaging system that informs tenants of whether or not they have the right to counsel when facing an eviction notice in New York City. The text bot flow was created on TextIt. EFNYC is a static site built with Gatsby.js and deployed with Netlify. Within TextIt, a web hook is called, sending a POST request from TextIt with information such as zip code, borough, NYCHA, income eligible, and area eligible. I wrote a lambda function (runs serverless code in response to events) that takes this information and returns a url with the appropriate information, according to the tenant’s answers. I also contributed to their open-source codebase, fixing bugs on the front-end and the back-end using languages such as React and Python.

I presented my work at the 2019 Symposia of Undergraduate Research and Public Service. See my poster here!

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