Women’s Adult Campus
A separate adult program building intended to support eligible women experiencing homelessness or housing instability.
Why ShelterNow exists
Shelter operations should not depend on disconnected tools
Housing staff may have to manage resident records, bed availability, incident reports, referrals, service plans, staff communication, shift notes, documents, supplies, volunteers, and required reports across several disconnected systems.
Fragmented workflows can increase duplicate work, missed information, inconsistent documentation, communication failures, and administrative pressure on staff.
ShelterNow is intended to bring key operational functions into one secure platform while allowing each organization, campus, building, program, and staff role to have appropriate access and configuration.
Technology should support professional judgment and human relationships. ShelterNow is not intended to replace trained staff, qualified providers, emergency services, legal advice, clinical judgment, or required government systems.
Multi-program design
One platform supporting specialized shelter programs
ShelterNow is being designed to recognize that different shelter programs require different eligibility rules, household structures, staffing, facilities, security controls, documentation, services, and reporting.
Men’s Adult Campus
A separate adult program building intended to support eligible men experiencing homelessness or housing instability.
Mixed-Gender Adult Campus
A separate inclusive adult program building intended to serve eligible adults across different identities and circumstances.
Children and Youth Shelter
A specialized program requiring age-appropriate records, safeguarding, education coordination, guardian information, and youth-specific permissions.
Couples Shelter
A planned program for eligible adult couples without children, with relationship, consent, household, room-assignment, and individual-service records.
Family Shelter
A household-based program supporting adults and children together while maintaining individual records, family relationships, and household-level planning.
Veterans Shelter
A specialized program intended to support veteran status, benefits coordination, service history, healthcare referrals, and veteran-focused partnerships.
Domestic Violence Shelter
A highly restricted program requiring confidential locations, protected records, limited search visibility, survivor-centered permissions, and heightened security.
Future Specialized Programs
The architecture is intended to allow additional programs, populations, eligibility models, locations, and service structures to be added over time.
Core platform modules
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Connected tools for daily shelter operations
ShelterNow is being designed as a modular platform so organizations can manage connected responsibilities without giving every employee access to every record.
Organizations
Manage separate organizations, operating entities, departments, permissions, policies, and reporting structures.
Campuses and Buildings
Organize separate campuses, confidential locations, buildings, floors, rooms, beds, service areas, and operational status.
Residents and Households
Maintain individual resident records while connecting couples, families, guardians, dependents, and other approved household relationships.
Beds and Occupancy
Track bed status, assignments, reservations, holds, maintenance, accessibility, room restrictions, and occupancy history.
Referrals and Intake
Coordinate referral sources, eligibility review, waitlists, documents, intake tasks, denials, transfers, and placement decisions.
Services and Assessments
Record project starts, assessments, goals, services, referrals, status updates, annual reviews, follow-up, and exits.
Incidents and Safety
Document incidents, involved parties, immediate actions, notifications, follow-up, review, corrective action, and restricted information.
Staff and Scheduling
Support staff profiles, roles, shifts, campus assignments, certifications, training, supervision, and availability.
Communication
Coordinate announcements, handoff notes, secure messages, alerts, task assignments, escalations, and program updates.
Documents
Organize consent forms, identification, assessments, policies, releases, agreements, signatures, and expiration dates.
Reporting
Produce appropriate operational, program, occupancy, outcome, incident, funding, compliance, and organization-level reports.
Audit and Oversight
Record access, edits, exports, approvals, significant decisions, permission changes, and other auditable activity.
Household-aware records
Connect people without erasing individual records
Couples and families may enter a program together, but every resident remains an individual person with separate rights, privacy needs, services, documents, history, goals, and consent.
ShelterNow is intended to maintain individual resident records while creating approved household relationships that help staff coordinate room assignments, family services, guardianship, dependents, benefits, referrals, and transition planning.
Relationship information should not automatically grant one person access to another person’s confidential records.
- Individual records Each adult, child, youth, partner, parent, dependent, or other resident receives a separate record.
- Household relationships Approved connections may identify couples, parents, children, guardians, dependents, and other relevant relationships.
- Shared placement Authorized staff may coordinate household room or unit assignments without combining confidential individual records.
- Relationship changes Staff may document separation, safety restrictions, consent changes, custody updates, household transfers, or other changes.
Privacy and security
Different programs require different levels of protection
ShelterNow is being designed around role-based access, program separation, restricted records, audit logs, and additional safeguards for highly sensitive programs.
Role-based access
Access should depend on the employee’s role, organization, assigned campus, program responsibilities, and legitimate need for information.
Organization separation
One organization should not automatically be able to view the residents, staff, incidents, reports, or internal operations of another organization.
Campus restrictions
Staff assigned to one building or program should not automatically receive access to unrelated campuses or specialized records.
Domestic violence confidentiality
Confidential shelter addresses, resident locations, safety plans, protected contacts, records, and identifying details require heightened restrictions.
Youth safeguards
Youth records may require age-aware permissions, guardian information, mandatory-reporting documentation, school coordination, and specialized access rules.
Audit history
Sensitive access, edits, exports, downloads, permission changes, and disclosures should be recorded for review.
Minimum necessary access
Employees should receive access to the information needed for assigned duties rather than broad access to all records.
Secure lifecycle
Privacy planning should address collection, storage, use, sharing, retention, archival, correction, export, and secure deletion.
Multi-stage resident workflow
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Supporting the full program journey
ShelterNow is intended to support more than an intake form. Resident information may need to change throughout referral, entry, service participation, assessment, transition, exit, and follow-up.
Referral
Record the referral source, requested program, household composition, urgency, eligibility information, documents, and referral status.
Eligibility Review
Document program criteria, accommodation needs, safety factors, available capacity, approval, denial, waitlist, or redirection.
Project Start
Create the active enrollment, confirm consent, assign the program and campus, record initial status, and begin required workflows.
Placement
Assign an appropriate building, room, bed, family unit, household placement, accessibility feature, or temporary hold.
Assessments
Complete initial, interim, annual, safety, service, housing, health, education, or other approved assessments.
Services and Updates
Record services, referrals, goals, progress, status updates, documents, appointments, barriers, and significant changes.
Exit and Transition
Document exit destination, housing status, household changes, service connections, documents, referrals, and transition plans.
Follow-Up
Support authorized follow-up, outcome tracking, re-engagement, referrals, return-prevention efforts, and program evaluation.
Compliance development
Comparable-database readiness requires more than similar fields
ShelterNow is not currently represented as a finished HMIS product or compliant comparable database.
Future comparable-database readiness would require a documented field-by-field mapping to the applicable HMIS Data Standards, complete multi-stage workflows, data quality controls, reporting, security, privacy, user management, auditability, retention procedures, training, governance, and qualified legal and technical review.
Requirements may differ for victim service providers, youth programs, veteran programs, family programs, public contracts, grants, healthcare-related information, and local coordinated-entry participation.
- HMIS data-element crosswalk
- Project start through exit workflows
- Data-quality validation
- Role and program permissions
- Required reporting and exports
- Security and privacy review
Product roadmap
Completed
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In Development
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Planned
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What has been built and what remains ahead
The roadmap reflects development direction rather than guaranteed release dates or confirmed production capabilities.
Early SwiftUI foundation
Initial application structure, navigation, resident views, dashboards, models, stores, and interface concepts have been created.
Initial Firebase connection
Early Firebase configuration has been added to support continued application and data-development work.
Multi-organization structure
Work continues on organization-level dashboards, separate data access, program ownership, and cross-campus administration.
Resident and household records
Individual, household, relationship, enrollment, service, assessment, placement, and exit structures require continued development.
Operations modules
Bed management, incidents, messaging, volunteers, emergencies, settings, scheduling, tasks, and reporting remain under development.
Confidential-program protections
Domestic violence, youth, health-related, legal, and other restricted records require specialized privacy and visibility controls.
HMIS crosswalk and reporting
Applicable HMIS data standards, exports, reports, validation, project workflows, and implementation requirements must be mapped.
Security testing
Authentication, authorization, encryption, logs, backups, recovery, vulnerabilities, privacy controls, and incident response require testing.
Pilot validation
Future pilot use would require controlled testing, user feedback, training, documentation, issue tracking, legal review, and defined success criteria.
Current limitations
ShelterNow is not yet a finished production system
ShelterNow should not currently be used as the sole system for regulated shelter operations, emergency response, clinical records, legal decisions, required HMIS participation, victim-service-provider records, or other high-risk uses without appropriate validation and approval.
Features described on this page represent development goals and architecture plans. They are not guarantees that every function has been completed, tested, secured, released, or approved for a particular organization.
- Not publicly released
- Not independently validated
- Not represented as HMIS compliant
- Not represented as a compliant comparable database
- Security testing remains planned
Help strengthen ShelterNow
Contact Firebird
Better technology begins with real operational experience
Firebird welcomes thoughtful input from shelter staff, administrators, service providers, victim-service professionals, youth workers, veterans organizations, security specialists, developers, compliance professionals, and people with lived experience.