Millions of refugees across the globe, due to global conflict or natural phenomena, are forced to leave their homes and live in low-quality, temporary housing. The majority of these shelters lack a fundamental component of safety and well-being: floors. Emergency Floor is an initiative developed by Sam Brisendine and Scott Key to solve this problem, and bring safety to refugee shelters and the people in them. With their new Indiegogo campaign, Emergency Floor is working to provide efficient, inexpensive flooring that is directly geared towards assisting relief agencies.
Learn more about Emergency Floor after the break.
Emergency Floor doesn’t rely on newly manufactured products to spread health and safety to refugee communities -- their secret ingredient is wooden shipping pallets. Used for transporting materials in bulk to refugee camps, the pallets are often left underutilized afterwards. Emergency Floor designed a modular flooring system to sit on top of this practically free resource, providing an inexpensive and abundant way to keep families across the world a step above hazardous ground conditions, such as infected soils, flooding, and freezing temperatures.
Brisendine and Key were graduate students at the Rice University School of Architecture when they developed this idea to keep families healthier and happier across the globe. In partnership with the IKEA Foundation’s Better Shelter program, they were able to test prototypes in Sweden.
Emergency Floor has gained the support of USAID, provided Brisendine and Key’s initiative can gain independent support as well. With the money they raise, Brisendine and Key plan to bring Emergency Floor to families in Iraq, and families in Nepal whose homes fell victim to the recent earthquake. Contribute to the Emergency Floor campaign through Indiegogo here.
