Civic Tech
Sep 26, 2025
Philly Truce is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit founded during COVID to reduce street violence through community-led peace patrols, residents, community leaders, and law enforcement walking neighborhoods together. Through a partnership with the District Attorney's office, that grew into the Peace Patrol Program: paid work for people leaving incarceration, giving them parole-hour credit, income, and a real bridge back into society. I initially joined as a UX volunteer and was quickly asked to step into a UX team lead role as the scope and complexity of the work grew.
The project started as a peace-patroller-facing app, but early field research surfaced a misalignment: many peace patrollers lacked reliable phone access, and understandably, many recently out of incarceration were wary of handing over personal information to a new app. Meanwhile, the founders, Steven and Mazi, were running the entire operation by phone calls, texts, a whiteboard, and one Excel file that even they admitted was painful to use, no personnel management, no route assignments, no scheduling system, starting from scratch every single week. Investing further in the peace-patroller app would have helped a periphery use case; modernizing Steven and Mazi's own process would fix the actual bottleneck. Making that case took more than a mockup, it meant showing the founders the ROI on their own time.
That reframe shaped everything that followed. We built Safe Path as a dual platform: mobile-first for patrollers in the field, desktop and tablet for admin route and shift management, designed for trust and low tech literacy at every step, with large tap targets, simple flows, an SMS-only fallback for anyone without a smartphone, and shared-device privacy considerations. On the patroller side, the core experience stayed ruthlessly simple: clock in, clock out, see your hours. We layered in a messaging system where every shift automatically got a temporary group chat, with SMS integration so no one was excluded by their device, plus, added after early testing, a discreet way for patrollers to request assistance without drawing attention. On the admin side, we replaced ten-plus hours of manual weekly planning with a single calendar view where Steven and Mazi could build routes, assign patrollers, and see the entire week at a glance.
The impact was transformational. Admin planning time dropped from 10+ hours a week to just 2-3, freeing Steven and Mazi to actually run the program instead of just scheduling it, and patrol capacity grew 5x, from 1-2 daily patrols to multiple simultaneous patrols across neighborhoods, school routes, public events, and eventually paid SEPTA train patrols citywide. Over the year, I conducted 30+ user interviews, including in-person field studies with peace patrollers, administrators, and community members, and delivered 20+ screens across the mobile and admin experiences, while co-leading a rotating team of 5-8 volunteer designers. Safe Path now supports 100+ active monthly users, and Philly Truce has engaged 1,000+ volunteers since launch, including coordinating 680 volunteers across 77 blocks in a single "Hug the Block" initiative. That growth has directly supported increased city and state grant funding, giving the founders real data to show what the program can do.
