Hack for Social Impact 2025
🚀Make an impact on real world problems in a single weekend!🚀
HSI is back! Join Hack for Social Impact once again to tackle real-world challenges! We are teaming up with non-profit partners to present you with important, pressing, and well-scoped challenges. These problems can be solved by you!
🏆 Last year's winners went to present at UN Climate Conference and build startups that get accepted to YC and raise seed funding!
🎯Your weekend hack can be next year's success story!✨
For this year's challenges, we have partnered with 6 Bay Area organizations on problems that need your technical expertise:
🏠Homelessness:
1.Project Homeless Connect: A 92% funding cliff threatens homelessness services in one of the largest SF organizations serving local communities
2.California Homeless Youth Project: Homeless youth face exhausting, repetitive intakes across agencies—trauma-informed AI can capture needs once and streamline access to housing, health, and safety.
🌎Climate:
3. Point Blue Conservation Science: Massive biodiversity datasets remain underused despite their potential to shape federal and state policy and direct multi-million-dollar habitat funding—natural-language tools and impact tracking can democratize access.
❌Real Estate Corruption:
4.Center for Investigative Reporting: Hidden corruption is buried in terabytes of real estate filings—network analysis can trace ownership webs and expose financial flows.
⚖️Justice:
5.The Innocence Center: Wrongfully convicted people still use a manual repetitive paper applications— can AI generate structured case files to accelerate exonerations?
ℹ️Information Democracy:
6.Mission Local: Critical civic records are siloed or hidden behind slow request processes—Can AI fuse datasets, flag anomalies, and surface accountability stories in real time?
🌟In addition to cash prizes and perks from our sponsors, winners will get the chance to implement their ideas with our partners and drive meaningful change.
For more information on the event and a recap of last year, visit our website!
Prizes
🥇First place: $3000 project grant* or $2000 cash prize
🥈Second place: $1500 Project grant* or $1000 Cash prize
🥉Third place: $500 Cash prize
*Project grant= collaborate with the non-profit to complete the project to a deployable state, best faith effort.
Also .. 👀 Prizes for Best Use of Technology ...
Google Technology prize:
First place: $1,000 in GCP credits to each team member
Second place: $800 in GCP credits to each team member
Third place: $500 in GCP credits to each team member
And... A Crowd Favorite Prize nominated by your fellow hackers!💫
Schedule:
Day 1: Saturday, Nov 8
9:00am Registration & Breakfast
9:30am Opening ceremony
12:00pm Lunch
6:00pm Dinner
9:00pm Venue closed, no overnight stay
Day 2: Sunday, Nov 9
9:00am Breakfast
12:00pm Lunch
3:00pm Team Presentations
6pm: Closing Remarks & Awards Ceremony
6:30pm Networking & Wrap-up
Our Partners:
Project Homeless Connect
California Homeless Youth Project
Point Blue Conservation Science
Center for Investigative Reporting
The Innocence Center
Mission Local
Our 2025 Sponsors:
Also sponsoring this year is bildAI, Hack for Social Impact 2024 winner. The team was accepted into YC immediately after the hackathon and raised seed funding from OpenAI's first investor.
Shoutout to our Venue Sponsor Wefunder, and to Cloudflare and Daytona, and Lovable for their support! And to our Community Partners FastForward and SFTech4Good.
☕️And thank you to SlowStreet Coffee for fueling us with coffee on opening day! ☕️
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Interested in joining the HSI team? Contact us!
Interested in becoming a sponsor? Contact us!
Interested in work working with our partners? Join the list!