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DonatePitch Night judges select Student Housing Education Network, an online educational hub that guides students on living independently.
Published on April 7, 2023
Anxiety about Canada’s housing and rental markets is high and post-secondary students are especially feeling it.
That daunting task of finding a safe, affordable place to call home is why one team of Future City Builders is focusing on equipping students with information and resources, in a bid to lessen that anxiety.
Evergreen’s Future City Builders initiative brings together youth aged 18-29 in cities across Canada to create and launch innovative solutions to urban challenges. After months of Virtual Design Thinking labs, networking, workshops, and mentorship, three teams from Moncton, Sackville, Saint John and Fredericton pitched their ideas to a panel of judges.
The Urban Action Pitch Night showcased a variety of innovative ideas, spanning transportation, housing and food insecurity. But there could be only one winner and it was Student Housing Education Network (SHEN) — an online educational hub that will guide students on living independently — that was awarded first prize and $5,000 in seed funding.
Team SHEN — Elaheh Ekhveh, Hannah Ehler, Nawfal Emad and Sarah Hebert — tell Evergreen about their winning idea, inspirations and vision for the hub.
Evergreen’s Future City Builders program hosts a Virtual Design Thinking Lab so participants can network with peers, mentors and subject matter experts, and develop the focus of their “healthy city” pitch.
The team initially identified both housing and transportation as urban challenges.
“When we interviewed people in the early stages we’d asked questions about transportation, but everything kept coming back to the topic of housing,” Hebert says.
But their inspiration was partly based on their personal experience as renters. They knew how stressful housing issues could be.
“Last year I was on the Mount Allison University Students’ Union, and under my portfolio was off-campus housing,” Ehler says. “I was able to get a better understanding of some of the struggles students face — that this is a province-wide issue for young people, no matter how big or small the city they live in.”
The team had several discussions with community members, hearing about issues relating to housing supply and affordability. But they also discovered an important underlying issue: housing education. Student tenants face a number of barriers and are susceptible to fraud and unsafe housing. Though these issues don’t exclusively impact young people, their inexperience makes them especially vulnerable.
“We need young people to be educated about housing and how the rental process works and where they can seek assistance when they need it,” Ehler says.
While housing services are available in New Brunswick, the feedback they received from the community is that these services can be hard to locate and absorb.
Their solution was a website that could act as a centralized location for housing resources. University students could find information about lease contracts, tenant rights, to-do lists before moving in, roommate agreements and more.
“We also talked about being able to connect people with more experienced tenants so they could get that one-on-one advice,” Emad shares. “I’m still very new at renting. I signed my first lease just a couple months ago. Thinking back, I would have loved to have a list of questions to ask my roommate before going in.”
Now equipped with $5,000 in seed funding, team SHEN turns to launching their resource hub. Funding will go towards platform development, events and outreach, and marketing.
They’re also planning to gather an advisory committee to help inform the type of content that will be essential to the website. The team is also determined to engage the community to decide what resources should be added to the hub, putting the word out to different groups that they’re looking for guidance on the direction of the platform to best suits the community’s needs.
“In the future, we see other students taking over and SHEN becoming a student-led resource for students,” Hebert says.
The Future City Builders program brings together like-minded young people to design a concrete solution to address “healthy city” challenges in their city. The Moncton, Sackville, Saint John and Fredericton cohort of the Future City Builders program is generously funded by Beanfield Metroconnect, the Government of Canada under the Future Skills program, and RBC Future Launch, as well as other anonymous funders.
