Saco woman develops app to help those in crisis situations

SACO — A local woman has created an app that will help people in crisis quickly find resources.

 Saco resident Eliza Conley-Lepene was assigned a paper two years ago for an advocacy class at the University of Maine, Augusta. The assignment was to identify a problem and find a way to solve it.

“I thought, I’m going to do this paper and I’m going to knock it out of the park,” said Conley-Lepene. As part of the assignment, she made a prototype of an app that would help people in crisis find the help they needed within a few taps of a cell phone.

And yes, she got an A on the project, but she didn’t stop there. Once she had created a demo of the app, she found she couldn’t stop.

Conley-Lepene continued to work on the app, which she named Safe House because it gives people in crisis the resources get to the safer place that they need to sooner. The app is available at http://safehousenational.org.

Conley-Lepene drew from her own life experiences when creating Safe House. When she was leaving a violent relationship in 2016, it was overwhelming to be in a crisis situation and try to navigate help.

“There needed to be a simplified process,” she said.

Safe House gives people in crisis that simplified process. In an easy to navigate screen, users can click on icons for different areas of crisis, including human trafficking and domestic violence. There is also an icon to click for pro-bono legal advice.

In the center of the app screen is an emergency icon, where users can quickly and discreetly connect to 911.

Safe House is registered non-profit with a dedicated board of volunteers. The app currently has national resources, along with resources for Maine, New York, Rhode Island, some of New Jersey and some Native American tribal resources.

Board members are researching and working to create resources for all states and a more comprehensive listing of tribal resources.

“Anybody at any time could be faced with a crisis,” said Conley-Lepene, who envisions the app as some day being a factory preset on cell phones.

So far, there has been about 3,000 downloads of Safe House, she said.

Conley-Lepene said she recently received a call from a grateful person who was crying and thanking her because a friend of theirs was feeling suicidal and reached out to their phone, hit the icon in the Safe House app and was directed to the help they needed.

Safe House received a grant from the Maine Technology Institute earlier this year for the trademark and patent process, and a non-provisional patent was filed in September, said Conley-Lepene.

Conley-Lepene also owns Spa Voyage, a Hawaiian themed spa in Kennebunk. One dollar from every service at Spa Voyage is donated to Safe House.

For more information on Safe House, go to https://www.facebook.com/safehousenational.

Publisher Liz Gotthelf can be reached at [email protected].