A pair of undergraduate students at Waterloo Engineering are using their technical skills to help house victims of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
Krish Shah and Adrian Gri, who are studying software engineering, helped build a website called TakeShelter to connect people who need housing with those who have extra space in their homes.
"People can impact people in the poorest, most remote communities, just from their dorm rooms,” Shah said in a media interview. “So once we realized that was the case, we created a nonprofit to have that impact."
Shah and Gri worked with peers they met online to first build a site for refugees of the invasion of Ukraine.
And after a massive earthquake and subsequent aftershocks killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria last month, they went without sleep for 48 hours to modify the site to help house survivors in partnership with aid groups.
They also hope to put the basic platform to use to help people affected by future crises.