This teenager built a website to aid Ukrainian refugees

Meet Avi Schiffman, the 19-year-old whose website is helping Ukrainian refugees find safe homes.

Transcript

00:00I came up with this idea when I was in a public protest in San Diego a few weeks ago.

00:11There were a bunch of people there holding up signs saying, like, stop Putin.

00:14There were a few Ukrainian people speaking.

00:16It was amazing for, like, the few hundred people in San Diego, but I felt that I could

00:21use my skills to make something for the hundreds of millions of people in Ukraine and Eastern

00:26Europe and all that area.

00:27What I really like about Ukraintakeshelter.com is it makes these refugees feel less powerless.

00:31It really helps put the initiative back in their hands.

00:39That was kind of, I think, my introduction to, like, internet activism, if you want to

00:43call it that.

00:48I saw that there are millions of refugees that are flooding out of Ukraine and ending

00:52up in countries like Poland, Germany, Moldova, etc.

00:55And I went to go look at the systems in place for connecting these refugees to hosts, and

01:00I felt that they were super inefficient and just wouldn't scale.

01:03So when I came up with this idea, the next morning I immediately called my friend Marco

01:06from Harvard, who's an amazing web developer.

01:08I can code, too, but there's so much we need to do for this website, we need to get it

01:11out as soon as possible.

01:12So we did not sleep for three nights, and we launched on March 2nd of 2022.

01:17We have over 20,000 listings now on the website, which is pretty cool.

01:21They're all over the world, everywhere from Australia to Israel, New Zealand.

01:25But we're primarily focused in Europe, so we have most of our listings around Germany,

01:29Poland.

01:30We also have the website translated into over a dozen native languages.

01:33So we've got Polish, German, French, all that kind of stuff.

01:36So with this platform, it's been great because refugees are able to just immediately start

01:42finding housing rather than waiting weeks or however long it'll take.

01:50We're now starting to partner with major aid organizations.

01:53So I expect by this time next week, we'll have helped hundreds of thousands more refugees.

01:58To me, it's still like, wow, it's just like a website.