Our Team
Heeya Das
Annie Eom
Sunny Eom
Samika Mallick
We, a group of four friends, have been working together for two years to help people in need and solve chronic societal problems, mainly through education activism. When we were discussing issues our community has to solve, we immediately focused on the issue of homelessness because it was something that we witnessed in our daily lives. We had always known that homelessness is one of our nation’s most important crises and that unhoused people do not have proper access to food, shelter, clothes, healthcare, technology, and more. When researching the severity of the issue, we were surprised by the dramatic increase of the unhoused population both in Alameda County and nationwide during the pandemic. Alameda County reported a 22% increase in the unhoused population from 2019 to 2022, reaching 9,747, and the unhoused population in California and the US reached 161,548 and 580,466, respectively, with around 40% of them being unsheltered. Many of them live in dire conditions, shown by the fact that 13,000 unhoused people die every year in the US and that the life expectancy for them is only 50 years. It was clear to us that it was an imminent issue and that we must take action. Therefore, we decided to launch Haven for Unhoused.