Transforming Crisis and Emergency Accommodation Management Across Victoria
Client | McAuley Community Services for Women
Partners | Homes Victoria, Department of Families, Fairness and Housing
In Victoria, services must rapidly secure safe accommodation for people in crisis. Women and children escaping violence. People experiencing homelessness. Young people leaving foster care. Families displaced by floods or fires.
McAuley had already built something powerful.
The Motel Mapping Database, a grassroots tool that let services see available motel accommodation across the state. It worked, and proved that shared visibility could dramatically improve how crisis placements were coordinated.
But the system had reached its limits. It ran on unsupported technology, the user experience was basic, and it was never built to scale across the broader service and government ecosystem.
We designed a purpose-built platform that evolves the original model into something far more powerful.
The platform combines Google Maps and location intelligence with a secure, scalable Microsoft cloud architecture. Services can see accommodation options in real time, quickly assess suitability, and coordinate placements far more effectively.
The system also helps prevent incompatible cohorts from being placed together. For example ensuring, wherever possible, that women and children escaping violence are not placed in the same accommodation as clients with complex alcohol or drug dependency needs.
The result: a scalable crisis accommodation platform built for the realities of social services—giving organisations better visibility of supply, safer placements, and stronger coordination across the system.
Unicorn Studio Co designed the strategy, system architecture and platform intelligence needed to make crisis accommodation coordination safer, smarter and far more effective across Victoria.
We transformed a practical workaround into an intelligent system designed for the real complexity of crisis accommodation by bringing together strategy, governance, imagination, design, technology and human insight.