After Disaster, Connecting Communities
Yiyuan ‘Jasmine’ Qin ’12 launched a tech startup to help disaster victims in Puerto Rico
Katrina, Sandy, Ian, Irma, Maria.
Five of the most devastating hurricanes in recent memory.
In September 2017, Irma and Maria served up a one-two punch in the Caribbean, decimating the island of Puerto Rico. Category 5 hurricanes like Maria can throw wind speeds 157 mph and higher, ripping shingles off roofs and tossing cars through the air. Maria dumped 20 inches of rain in only a few hours, damaging more than 300,000 homes.
After hurricanes subside, government and nonprofit disaster-relief organizations kick into high gear, bringing food and fresh water and providing safe shelter to residents impacted by the storm.
Yet years later, despite those efforts residents still feel the impact of disasters.
Yiyuan “Jasmine” Qin ’12 cofounded tech startup re+connect to close the gap between well-meaning government and nonprofit aid and the needs of individuals in places like Puerto Rico. She and her team recently received a $1-million grant from the National Science Foundation to test their community-based software.
“Re+connect is a participatory civic tech initiative with the goal to crowdsource up-to-date information on who needs what and where on the ground so governments and foundations can better reach and distribute disaster relief,” Qin said.
The app is still in its early phases. Winning the NSF grant competition is the first step toward making re+connect a reality on the ground. The team—made up of an interdisciplinary consortium of universities, nonprofits, and technology experts—has a year to complete a pilot project that tests their technology on the island. “This year is all about finding a viable path forward, so this can be a sustainable, scalable, and transferable solution,” she said.
“The truth is, when communities are better connected to one another, they’re more likely to survive.”
Yiyuan ‘Jasmine’ Qin ’12
Since graduating with a degree in environmental science from Colby, Qin has focused on community-driven approaches to solving climate change. That includes spending a year studying river communities along the Rhine, Amazon, Mekong, Ganges, and Murray-Darling rivers through a Watson Fellowship and completing not one but two master’s degrees—the first in environmental management from Yale University, and the second an integrated design and management degree from MIT.
“I’ve always seen the power and the innovation capacity and what communities can do,” Qin said. “I just felt this challenge of building things from the top down without truly understanding and bringing in communities as a stakeholder as we build solutions to environmental issues.”
Her research at MIT led her to start re+connect. Said Qin, “The first time I went to Puerto Rico, I really saw the impact of climate change on people that I hadn’t seen before, and it was soul-crushing. When disasters happen, it’s very difficult for any relief entities to actually get into communities to help.”
Even with minor hurricanes, recovery can take time. But after Hurricane Maria, some parts of Puerto Rico lost power for almost an entire year—a blackout blocking the rebuilding of roads, hospitals, schools, and water systems. By 2022, though FEMA allocated $28 billion to help the island recover, officials had only used $5.3 billion, or about 19 percent. Rebuilding has gone slowly, leaving the island in a vulnerable spot for the next hurricane season.
That’s what re+connect hopes to change.
“The truth is, when communities are better connected to one another, they’re more likely to survive,” said Qin. “Our hope is that through crowdsourcing community information and processing that data, we can build social infrastructure and connect communities with organizations and resources. I want to give people a sense of agency so they can continue to call Puerto Rico home.”
For Qin, stepping into a leadership role is the culmination of years of taking an interdisciplinary, community-based approach toward environmental science—something she learned from her adviser, Philip Nyhus, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Professor of Environmental Studies. “Having Philip as my adviser was probably the luckiest thing ever for my professional career,” she said. “It wasn’t just teaching me the specifics of my field, but as an immigrant, coming here by myself, having a mentor like that built so much of my confidence to just go for it.”
This kind of confidence meant dabbling in a wide variety of classes and extracurriculars at Colby and as a graduate student. “I think the ability to try different things gives you so much confidence, and the opportunities at Colby started it all,” she said. “After all, entrepreneurship is the idea of tinkering with something that no one has done before.”
Now, she’s taking everything she’s learned and trying something new.
Said Qin, “It’s a whole new challenge for me to bring this technology to life, and I’m so excited to make a difference.”
