These students built a website to help rehome people in Turkey, Syria and Ukraine

Two students at the University of Waterloo are helping survivors of the Turkish and Syrian earthquakes in a big way.

Krish Shah and Adrian Gri, both enrolled in the software engineering program, have helped create a website called TakeShelter. It's designed to connect people who need housing with people who have extra living space in their homes.

Together with three other North American students they met online, Shah and Gri created TakeShelter by partnering  with advocacy groups in Syria and Turkey.

"We realised the nonprofit space doesn't really utilize the insane power and skill of technology," Shah said.

The five co-founders of TakeShelter met through social media, where they shared their passion for the non-profit sector and technology. To date, the creators of the website have not all met in person — but they found they didn't need to.

"The truth is that there's a new age of super heroes," Shah said. "People can impact people in the poorest, most remote communities, just from their dorm rooms. So once we realised that was the case, we created a nonprofit to have that impact."

First created to help Ukraine

A few months after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Shah said team members linked up with the common goal of wanting to help Ukrainian refugees.

In November, after only one week of work, the first iteration of their TakeShelter website was created.

Shah said thousands of people quickly signed up to connect with refugees looking for a new place to live.

He estimates that about 100,000 Ukrainians may have found a new temporary home through their online app.

More recently, another disaster struck in a different part of the world.

Shah and his teammates saw an opportunity to reconfigure the app to help find homes for earthquake survivors in Turkey and Syria.

"After seeing news of the earthquake our team, having not slept for 48 hours, launched the TakeShelter website and began distributing it to humanitarian organizations, online aid groups, and on social media," Shah said.

He said they have partnered with the Syrian Emergency Task force to help people learn about the services available through TakeShelter.

Since then, 176 verified users have signed up on the Turkey/Syria TakeShelter platform. Shah said about 50 to 100 individuals and families affected by the earthquake have been able to find temporary housing through their app.

On standby for future emergencies

Shah said with just a little tweaking, TakeShelter can be easily customized for future disaster response, anywhere in the world.

"The true hope is that we don't have to use these platforms and these crises don't happen, but we want to be ready once they do," he said. "So if we spend time in the platform's dormant phases, building up the infrastructure ... as soon as something happens, we can deploy the solution in a matter of minutes."