{"id":44921,"date":"2023-10-20T15:39:37","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/melbourne-tech-community-comes-together-to-help-refugees-settle-in-australia-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:39:37","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:39:37","slug":"melbourne-tech-community-comes-together-to-help-refugees-settle-in-australia-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/melbourne-tech-community-comes-together-to-help-refugees-settle-in-australia-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Melbourne tech community comes together to help refugees settle in Australia – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
More than 200 hundred founders, entrepreneurs, developers and investors have come together to come up with innovative ways to help refugees settle in Australia for the Melbourne debut of the global Techfugees movement.<\/p>\n
The weekend-long event was held at Launchpad in Richmond and saw 15 teams formulate a range of solutions, and organiser and Lulumpr founder Lama Tayeh says the turnout was better than expected.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were overwhelmed with the support and turnout, the vibe was amazing,\u201d Tayeh tells StartupSmart.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n Interpeter Central – a marketplace connecting newly settled refugees with interpreters – took out the top prize at the hackathon, winning $5000 from LaunchVic and a place in the Cultivate program to further develop the concept.<\/p>\n Created by Ali Raza, Andre Bergh and Harry Sanders, the idea is to improve access to language services to empower refugees who could otherwise face challenges like communicating with a doctor because their accredited interpreter speaks in a dialect they are not familiar with.<\/p>\n Given the vast array of dialects within various languages, Interpreter Central creates a platform to better match refugees with interpreters who properly meet their needs.<\/p>\n Another finalist was FriendFugees, a social networking app aiming to tackle isolation and mental health problems that develop from social exclusion.<\/p>\n The team, led by user experience specialist Suzan Majeed, was inspired to create the app because about 50% of refugees have been found to experience loneliness and don’t feel welcomed in the communities they resettle in.<\/p>\n Other solutions ranged from language learning with artificial intelligence to safe storage of personal data.<\/p>\n \u201cThe amount of solutions that came up from that short time and the quality of the demos that were presented were fantastic,\u201d Tayeh says.<\/p>\n \u201cEven the judges had a difficult time deciding because of how good the solutions were.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\nA range of ideas<\/h3>\n
Bringing Techfugees to Melbourne<\/h3>\n