Most day centers run on paper
A clipboard at the door. A shower list on a whiteboard. Mail in a bin, lockers in a binder, and whatever the last person on shift happens to remember. It holds together until the building gets busy, and the building is busy every day.
Flight Path puts all of it on one screen. A worker finds the person, taps what they need, and moves on. Logging a service checks the person in, so nobody does the same job twice. The next person on shift can see what already happened without asking anyone.
Attendance
Who is here today and who has been here before. Search by name, alias, year of birth, or number.
Showers
The queue in order, with wait times, kept on the tablet in the shower room instead of a whiteboard.
Lockers
Who has which locker, who is waiting for one, and what is still outstanding.
Mailroom
Mail logged when it arrives and when it is picked up, so "did anything come for me" takes a second to answer.
Action list
The follow-ups that need to happen, visible to whoever is working, not buried in one person's head.
Stations
A tablet can be tied to a place. The mailroom tablet opens the mailroom, ready for the next person in line.
Built for a counter, not a desk
Every decision in Flight Path answers to the same question: does this work when someone is standing at a counter with five people waiting?
Few taps, big targets
The common actions are one tap from the person's record. Nothing important is behind a menu, and the whole thing works on a tablet held in one hand.
A new volunteer is useful the same day
Volunteers can check people in, run the shower list, log mail, and start a locker waitlist without training on a database or asking permission.
Identity is handled carefully
Identifying details stay hidden until someone chooses to reveal them, and every reveal is written to a log. Records for people fleeing violence can be restricted, with access recorded every time.
The words come from the building
Neighbors, not cases. Glimmers, not achievements. The vocabulary in the software is the vocabulary the staff already use.
Where it sits next to HMIS
Flight Path is not an HMIS and it does not replace one. It is the record of what happens inside the building: who came in, what they were given, and what needs following up. Organizations that report into HMIS keep doing that work in HMIS.
We built Flight Path to sit alongside that reporting rather than on top of it. A person's HMIS number can live on their record so someone with access to both systems can reconcile them. We are not claiming an integration today, and we would rather say that plainly than imply one.
We also hold as little identifying information as the work requires. Less data on hand is less risk for the organization and for the person standing at the counter.
Our pilot partner
AHOPE Day Center
Asheville, North Carolina
Flight Path was built for the AHOPE Day Center, run by Homeward Bound of WNC. AHOPE is the front door to Homeward Bound's work. It is where someone gets a shower, a locker, an address for their mail, and the first conversation that leads toward housing.
Development is complete. Staff training and onboarding are underway now, and the system moves into daily use at the center this month.
Everything in the product came out of watching that building work, and the next version of it will come out of what the staff tell us over the coming weeks.
Built for more than one organization
Flight Path runs as a multi-tenant system. Each organization gets its own address, its own staff accounts, and its own records. Nothing is shared across organizations.
If you run a day center, a shelter, or an outreach program in Western North Carolina or beyond, and this looks like the problem you have, we would like to hear about how your front desk actually works. We are choosing the next few partners carefully and slowly.
Talk to us
The site is a placeholder while the product finds its footing at its first site. The fastest way to a real conversation is email.