We’Care: ESILV students win second prize at 2020 City’Zen Challenge

The City’Zen Challenge by Berger-Levrault is an annual inter-school competition which allows students to be creators of Tomorrow’s smart city. This year, the second prize-winning submission was the We’Care project, a platform for non-governmental organisations in social assistance, conceived by ESILV students.

We’Care is made up of five students from ESILV, the engineering school of the Pole Leonard de Vinci: Lélia Arlot, Florent Drilhon, Gaspard Arminjon, Julie Dura, Louis Ponce. Inspired by their humanitarian work within different organisations such as the Catholic Relief Services, the French Red Cross, these five engineering students have developed a platform which brings together all the field activities to aid homeless people. 

Berger-Levrault is a provider of software for collectivities and public administrations and sectors such as health, social aid, education, industry and transportation. The City’Zen challenge aims to encourage the initiatives with a robust social emphasis, where innovation can improve the daily existence of people, redesign the future of the cities and enables us to respond to the significant challenges of the 21st century. ESILV La Defense is one of the four schools partnering for the fourth edition of the competition. 

This year, the contest has drawn more than two hundred students who presented 45 projects, of which only 12 were selected for the grand final. 

Second prize: the We’Care team, a PING project

The idea of We’Care grew out of a generalist engineer project conducted in the third year of the engineering cycle. 

In teams of five, students are required to propose an innovative solution as a part of a competition. 

Lelia, Florent, Gaspard, Julie and Louis were all members of the same student association, LéoSphere, and they also took part in various social activities organised by NGOs that help the homeless. During these actions, they drew up a list of problems that relief organisations face when giving on-field homeless assistance. One of the most common issues is the lack of communication within an organisation and between different organisations. 

“Our objective for the PING project was to alleviate these problems of communication and digitalisation. So we imagined a technological solution: a web and mobile platform for social aid organisations and for any user, homeless or not, who wants to give different pieces of information to NGOs.” (Florent Drilhon, ESILV, class of 2022)

We’Care helps associations in three different ways: 

• On-field simplified data collection, thanks to electronic forms accessible on the application and completed with the help of volunteers from different organisations
• Follow-up of people met during social aid distribution programmes: the data is recoverable on the web platform to allow an efficient follow-up
• Communication between organisations and local community: different associations will be able to spread all their actions (food and clothing distribution, installation of new showers, and so on) on the web platform. These actions will be visible to other organisations, preventing them from covering the same areas, which can lead to a loss of money, time and other resources. 

“This second place is a real reward for our efforts and confirms the value and the relevance of our project”.