A 19-year-old Harvard student built a website to easily connect Ukrainian refugees with people willing to host them

• More than 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine after the Russian invasion.
• Two Harvard students have launched a website to help connect those refugees with potential hosts.
• "It's like a stripped-down version of Airbnb that's directly for refugees," the creator told Insider.

After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, causing more than a 1.5 million people to flee the country in an attempt to escape the war, Avi Schiffmann got to work.

Within a week of the invasion, the 19-year-old Harvard University student and his friend conceived, developed, and launched a website designed to seamlessly connect Ukrainian refugees with people willing to host them: UkraineTakeShelter.com.

"The website is basically a public bulletin to aid in the discoverability of available hosts for Ukrainian refugees," Schiffman told Insider in an interview on Sunday. "It's like a stripped-down version of Airbnb that's directly for refugees."

People can sign up as potential hosts from anywhere in the world and include details like where they are located, how many people they can host, what languages they speak, and if they can help with transportation.

Refugees don't even need to sign up. They can go to UkraineTakeShelter.com and enter the city where they're located and the site will pull up the closest possible hosts.

A search for a single person located in Kyiv, Ukraine, for example, returns potential hosts located in nearby countries like Poland, Romania, and Lithuania. The listings have titles like "Couch available for mother with kids" and "Bucharest - 1 room in flat." They're tagged with details like "2 spaces" available, "Russian Speaker," "Pets Allowed," and "Kid-Friendly."

By selecting a listing, a refugee is given contact information for the host and can make arrangements from there. The listings are automatically translated depending on who is using the site, making it extremely easy to use no matter your native language.

Schiffmann said the website was specifically designed to be as intuitive and simple as possible.

"We tried to put ourselves in the shoes of a refugee visiting this website. They're in a foreign country where they maybe don't speak the language. They're probably lost and confused and just escaped, literally, explosions and gunfire," he said. "They don't want to go to a website that's full of complicated paragraphs of government jargon."

He said the intent is that anyone who's used the internet before can figure out how to use it. The site has been vetted by cybersecurity experts and is designed so refugees do not have to input personal information.

As of Sunday evening, nearly 1,000 people from all over the world had signed up as potential hosts, but Schiffmann said that number is doubling every 12 hours. In addition to eastern Europe, hosts have posted listings from the US, Netherlands, Iceland, France, and many more. 

Many of the listings are in the West, according to Schiffmann, but they're working hard to spread the word, reaching out to celebrities, professors, aid organizations, and media outlets in eastern Europe.

'We did not sleep for 3 nights'

Schiffmann did not have a prior connection to Ukraine, but a friend had brought him to an anti-war protest in San Diego, and afterward, he began wondering if there was anything bigger he could do to help.

He said that despite warnings of a massive refugee crisis and people welcoming Ukrainians at train stations offering to host them, there was not a great way to connect the two. He sent a tweet suggesting someone build a website to do just that.

"I'm in my pajamas in my bed all cozied up, and the tweet started getting a lot of traction," Schiffmann said, adding that he realized he could actually build the site. "I immediately got out of bed and stayed up for a few hours to work on the initial site structure and interface."

Schiffmann called Marco Burstein, an 18-year-old web developer and friend of his from Harvard, and they immediately got to work.

"We did not sleep for three nights," Schiffmann said, adding that they launched the site within days, on March 3, exactly one week after the invasion began.

Schiffmann is no stranger to internet activism, as he called it. In January 2020, while still in high school, he launched a COVID-19 tracking site that was used by hundreds of millions of people. Later than year, he launched another site to help people track racial justice protests taking place throughout the US.

Now he's hoping that news of his refugee hosting site can spread just as quickly. He's encouraging anyone who hears about the site to share it online, in hopes that the people who need it can find it.

"If there are people reading this that know Ukrainians or Polish people or aid organizations that are working there," Schiffmann said, "help spread the word and share it."

"I truly do think that my website is leaps and bounds ahead of everything else that's out there."

Have a news tip? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@insider.com.