Rogue Raise: The Unhoused

Name: Rogue Raise: The Unhoused
Start: 2026-10-23T12:00:00.000Z
End: 2026-10-24T04:00:00.000Z
Location: White Rabbit Clubhouse

Building trustworthy data on homelessness in the Rogue Valley

About

Rogue Raise is White Rabbit's community build event: a focused, roughly 48-hour gathering inspired by the old barn raise, where neighbors came together to put up something none of them could build alone. Instead of a barn, we raise tools — working software and practical solutions aimed at a real problem facing the Rogue Valley.

Building trustworthy data on homelessness in the Rogue Valley
White Rabbit

This Raise takes on one of the hardest and most contested issues in the region: homelessness. The federally required Point-in-Time count happens once a year, in January — one of the worst possible times to take an accurate measure. Many people have left the area or are sheltering out of sight, and resources get allocated against a picture almost everyone agrees isn't true. The problem isn't a lack of compassion. The data is broken.

Over the weekend, teams will help a local public-health team build the data infrastructure to tell the true story of homelessness in our region, and to keep telling it over time. The work breaks into three buckets:

Clean the data we have — build a way to de-duplicate records and match the same person across many encounters: a lightweight, CRM-style system with confidence-based matching and persistent IDs, so one person isn't counted as three.

Make the count better — improve the Point-in-Time count with tools that work in the field: offline-capable mobile collection backed by a web dashboard.

Add new data — bring in signal that doesn't exist today, from places like meal programs, syringe exchange, and community reporting, plus the volunteer pipeline to gather it ethically and consistently.

A Raise on this topic only works if the people it's about are in the room. We open by hearing directly from unhoused community members about what they need and what they want to say. Teams form around facets of the challenge, build in parallel over the weekend, and present to a panel of real users who judge each project on one question: would you actually use this? Every project is handed off to a real owner tied back to the stakeholders, so the work outlasts the weekend.

Whether you write code, design, work in public health or social services, or simply want to lend a hand the way neighbors always have, there's a place for you at the Rogue Raise. Free to participate.