Save Near Me – St Leos College

Why as a team did you choose to focus on this challenge?

We chose this challenge because our school is a DEIS school, which means we see this challenge first hand very often. With the time we are living in, hidden poverty has become more and more prominent in Ireland due to inflation and the consequences that the COVID-19 pandemic had on our country, making this challenge a very interesting and relevant project for us to research.

What do you know now about the challenge that you didn't know before?

Before the challenge, we were unaware of how many people struggled with hidden poverty and that it might affect those close to us who are students at the school. There are other things that we had not previously considered that can lead to hidden poverty one of them is the distance from shops and how it affects peoples expenditure from travelling. According to our surgery results many individuals desire access to the cheapest food. We learnt the minimum wage is less than the living wage which is shocking.

What have you learnt about your Hero?

Our hero is called Emily Byrne. She is 25 years old. She works as a waitress in a restaurant. She owns minimum pay as a waitress which is €11.30 an hour this is not enough for her to provide. She is a single mother to one child with the only extra income being child benefit. She is ashamed of her situation and doesn’t want to ask for help. Her rent and energy has gone up due to inflation. She struggles to find time to spend with her child due to the stress of money.

If you could improve one thing for your Hero what would that be?

If we could improve one thing for Emily we would help her with food. She spends a lot of her free time looking for the cheapest food which stops her from spending more time with her child. Finding food to benefit her child is very hard when on a small budget. This is added stress and unnecessary when we have a solution. The stress has caused her to develop high blood pressure which is very dangerous.

Do you have any ideas for a potential solution? No matter how raw, share them with your Mentors for feedback.

Our solution is an app called Save Near Me. The app will pull up your local shops by looking at your location, and give you lists of food with the best prices. At the moment the app is just for food but we may extend it to include other item, such as pharmacy products and medicine . We hope to join with shops such as Lidl, Tesco and Aldi to have weekly updates on their deals.

Ask your Mentor anything …. This is a chance to ask your Mentors a direct question relating to your Big Idea.

What could we add to make it better? Could we add another feature that could save our hero even more money ? Dp you know anything common about hidden poverty? Any info that could be useful to us?