🎙️ Welcome 🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️🎙️

Welcome to Good For What?, a podcast series from HousingLab.world and GoodForWhat.org that explores how artificial intelligence, data, and design can be used ethically and effectively to end homelessness and improve housing stability.

Our conversations center around a simple question: AI good for what? Tech good for what? We look at real-world examples of how technology and data are used to improve people’s lives, helping leaders, service providers, and communities measure success through human-centered outcomes.

This live episode is recorded at the Built for Zero Fall Learning Session in Denver. The audience includes members of the Built for Zero network: city teams, nonprofits, policymakers, data leaders, and practitioners working to make homelessness rare and brief.

This podcast is hosted by Amelia Winger-Bearskin and sponsored by the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant in collaboration with our teams: Traci Blue and Frank Wells from Bright Community Trust; Yulia Panfil and Sabiha Zainulbhai from New America: Future of Land and Housing; and Amelia Winger-Bearskin from Hunter College.

Conversation Questions covered in this episode:

1. Tell me about a moment when you realized that data, or the way you gather it, helped you understand something vital about your community.
   
   
   
2. When you think about the people you serve, what’s one insight or story that changed how you think about “tech for good”?
   
   
   
3. Can you remember a time when technology helped you see a problem more clearly or helped your team respond faster or with more compassion?
   
   
   
4. What does “human-centered” mean to you in your day-to-day work? How do you keep people, not systems, at the heart of your decisions?
   
   
   
5. Sometimes tech promises a lot. How do you tell when a new tool or vendor is actually going to be useful for your goals, versus when it’s just adding noise?
   
   
   
6. How do you bring your community’s voice into decisions about data and design? What does listening look like in your context?
   
   
   
7. Privacy and dignity can feel abstract until they’re tested, is there a story that helped you see why they matter so much in this work?
   
   
   
8. If you could design one tool that doesn’t exist yet, something that would truly make your work easier or your community stronger, what would it be?
   
   
   
9. Looking ahead, what gives you hope about how AI and data could help us understand and care for one another better?
   
   
   

The question we always ask:

When you hear the question “Good for what?” what’s the first thing that comes to mind about the work you do every day?