Pioneer in Refugee Shelters & Settlements Design

MY IMPACT

Scott Key is the co-founder of Every Shelter, an organization designing shelter solutions for refugees and displaced families. Scott and his team have been serving displaced individuals for over 6 years, with the mission to build a localized refugee-aid ecosystem centered around the needs, preferences, and aspirations of refugees. Scott believes in refugees – their humanity, their wholeness, and every person’s right to have a home.

MY JOURNEY

Scott and his co-founder Sam Brisendine met at the Rice School of Architecture, and through education, learned that refugees often live in the dirt. Therefore, they started thinking around, “How can we provide a radically affordable floor for refugees?” Soon, the idea for their first project, Emergency Floor, emerged. Emergency Floor is a quickly deployable, lightweight, insulated flooring system that is perfect for winterization efforts. Initial research indicates that replacing dirt floors with Emergency Floor could improve cognitive development in children and reduce parasitic infections by 78%, instances of diarrhea by 49%, and anemia by 81%. To date, 19,052 individuals around the world have been served through this invention.

In addition to Emergency Floor, Scott, Sam, and their team have innovated and implemented more projects for refugees, including the Shelter Depot project. Shelter Depot is a locally adaptable DIY home improvement store serving the displaced, offering affordable, innovative and accessible products and services that inspire customers to create homes that they are proud of.

One of the people who inspired Scott was Samuel Mockbee, an architect and co-founder of the Auburn University Rural Studio program. The Rural Studio provides practical training for architecture students regarding the problems of poverty and substandard housing in underserved areas. To serve the underserved, Scott believes that it is important to have a north star and to be persistent. Through faith, he persists in serving others in need wholeheartedly.