Exchange for NGOs, Anti-stress App and Other Student Projects

The Open Your Eyes student organization, supported by the Centre for Leadership and Volunteer Work, has held the Charity Boost product marathon, a two-week intensive project to create products for charity organizations. The organizers and leaders of the winning projects told us about their initiatives and future plans.

Victoria Voronina, project coordinator
4th-year student of Political Science

I've been member of Open Your Eyes since my first year. For the last two years, I have been working as public relations manager and am responsible for organizing educational events at HSE University and beyond. In 2018, we held a roundtable dedicated to the New Year's charity, where experts joined us to discuss engaging students beyond volunteering.

In 2019, the Student Council of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science invited us to take part in a charity hackathon. The project was postponed with the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic. After spending six months at home, switching the usual visits to our charges in an online mode, I decided that it was time to try a new format. The Centre for Leadership and Volunteer Work supported our initiative, and we started working.

Initially, we planned to organize only a hackathon, but we then decided that it was difficult to do it without any experience and that we should start with a more familiar format. So we came up with the idea to organize a two-week intensive project to create product solutions – the Charity Boost Product Marathon.

The product marathon includes three main parts: workshops on the basics of creating a product, a meeting with an expert from a charity organization and a meeting with a mentor. At the first meeting, the participants chose which area to work in: information on the charity, bone marrow donation, assistance for homeless animals, homelessness, supporting children with disabilities, and assistance for the elderly.

At this stage, they could come up with an idea for a digital project and start gathering a team or join someone and work on the idea together.

After all the meetings and work with the mentor, the students defended their projects before a jury. The jury analysed whether the comments after communicating with the relevant foundation were considered and how achievable the idea was and gave feedback on the project. Almost all of the 45 participants reached the final after the first meeting! This is a very inspiring result.

I was very glad to see such motivated and creative students take part in the event. It will be great if they come to the hackathon next year — They will be able to find programmers, who could create a prototype of their solution.

Andrey Chernikov, ‘Exchange for Charity Projects’
3rd-year bachelor’s student of the HSE University and University of London Parallel Degree Programme in International Relations

Our team formed rather quickly, which surprised me a little, because I didn't have a specific product idea. I only indicated the topic that interested me in the form. But, in the end, we gathered the team of three people: Semyon Korchin, Yulia Bezus and myself. We all study in different faculties, so we worked well and complemented each other. I am grateful to the team for the work we’ve done, and I hope for future success.

We came up with the project idea, when we were discussing the problem and possible solutions. Together we suggested several options and chose the exchange for charity projects. Further communication with the mentor and the museum representative made us even more resolute, and we focused on working out the details, feeling confident that we were doing the right thing.

The exchange for charity projects is a platform on which a foundation requests funding for its project, for receiving services, or for purchasing necessary goods. A commercial organization interested in the project responds and becomes the foundation’s partner in this project. As a result, the foundation receives money and services, while the company gets PR, employee motivation and, possibly, nice bonuses such as gratitude, corporate events, etc. The project’s target audience is small funds, on the one hand, and small and medium-sized businesses on the other.

We have an elaborated development plan. Now we negotiate and plan to meet with representatives of our target audience to clarify some details and develop the mechanisms by which the platform will function. We will then use the acquired knowledge to finish the project and prepare it for the hackathon. I hope that it will be possible to gather a good team and create an MVP. We’ll then test the platform, launch it, and attract our first users. I want to believe that we’ll help those who need it.

Diana Avdeeva, calendar of good deeds ‘365 Good Deeds’
2nd-year student of the master’s programme in Russian as a Foreign Language in Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Perspective

I took part in the product marathon because I wanted to learn about the organizational and administrative part of charity. When helping other people, it is very important to bring (and not cause) good. Oddly enough, you need to know how to help properly.

The idea of the project (working title — ‘365 Good Deeds’) came to me while working on a more specific problem — the problem of homelessness. It turned out that the main problem of charity aimed at homelessness is lack of awareness. I therefore decided that it would be worth starting off my work by promoting the idea of volunteering and involving people in charity as such.

The ‘365 Good Deeds’ project is intended for young people from 18 to 35 years old who are active, can take initiative, and for those who want to and can help.

My team received an offer from the Centre for Leadership and Volunteer Work, represented by the Centre's Director Tatyana Zakharova, to implement the project at the university and focus on HSE students primarily. This will help us test the idea and involve more HSE students in good deeds. When it’s clear that the project works, I want to expand it to the whole country.

Ekaterina Serdyukova, ‘Two Drops’ app
1st-year student in Political Science

The product marathon attracted me because I could acquire soft skills that would help me in my future internship or work, as well as meet new people from other faculties. I wanted to meet experts in this field. I still keep in touch with some of them.

I did have some problems bringing the team together. I chose the difficult topic of bone marrow donation, and no one wanted to join me. A friend from another university worked with me, and I think we did a great job together.

We came up with the idea while discussing the problem with an expert from Rusfond who told us that the foundation has an agreement to create an app in Vkontakte, so we started to work on this idea.

Our project is called "Two Drops". This is an app to find people whose interests are similar like two drops of water. The idea is to find someone like you. Not similar in appearance, but in spirit: listening to the same music, watching the same movies, etc. Since we are all different, there will be only two or three people like you, or even no one. With this app, we want to dispel myths about bone marrow donation, and encourage people to decide to save a stranger’s life.

We plan to take part in the hackathon with our project and enlist the support of specialists in software development. We hope that this time we will be able to gather a full team and implement our idea.

Yegor Sapozhnikov, ‘Give Paw’ project
1st-year student of the master’s programme in Comparative Social Research

I decided to participate in the product marathon because of the opportunity it gives us to work with like-minded people and mentors from the business community and NGOs, as well as to bring a project to the MVP level. All this is valuable and exciting experience.

I had never worked with the problem of stray animals before, so I decided to look for ideas related to this. I remembered a mini-game about the survival of homeless people, which was recently created by Medusa with support from Night Shelter, and it seemed like it would be interesting to adapt it to the problem of stray animals. We gathered a team of participants who liked the idea, and together with Alina Efimova, Diana Sharafutdinova, Nastya Barbikova and Lisa Panova, we managed to carry out a detailed study and develop what in my view was an excellent project concept.

‘Give Paw’ is an educational text game in which you, as a stray dog, make various decisions in order to survive on the street and, if you are lucky, in a shelter. Applying various scenarios, a player gets an idea of the many aspects of the problem that homeless animals face and learns how he or she can help to solve these problems in our country. Today, Russians don’t understand why we see so many animals on the streets, and what principles should be followed to solve this problem that take into account both their interests and ours.

The project is intended for the widest audience, and we still have a lot of work to do to attract people. The next step is to participate in the hackathon, where we plan to find designers and programmers who are ready to join the game development.

Sergey Akopov, ‘Hug the Dog’ anti-stress platform
4th-year bachelor’s student in Information Science and Computation Technology

Initially, I was supposed to help organize the product marathon, but when I learnt about the project, I decided to participate.

We assembled the team easily; almost all the participants are members of the Moscow Student Pedagogical Team, where I head the social field. We decided to work with the issue of homeless animals. The topic is familiar to us, we organize trips to shelters and we are concerned about how to popularize this issue. Moreover, there are few restrictions in this area right now, so even the pandemic won’t prevent us from working on our product.

We discussed the idea for a very long time, spoke with the mentor and the foundation, and tried to find something relevant. We thought that now, during the pandemic, people are particularly susceptible to stress, and animals can help cope with negative emotions. We then figured out how to better arrange it in a gaming form through the app, tasks, rewards and interactive stories.

We also need to think about the new project title, as we learned that there is a very powerful Ukrainian social movement that helps homeless animals with the same name.

The key goal of the app is to encourage people to go to the shelter. In addition, it is important to provide people with information about shelters and to popularize this topic. We will guide users to this action through games, anti-stress content, videos, etc. Perhaps there will a chat in the app so that people find like-minded people and come together.

We are definitely going to take part in the hackathon and are waiting for information about what needs to be done for it and in what format it will be held, so that we can work more effectively.

January 13, 2021