This year's projects.

Accessibility Beyond Translation

Breeze Translate has been a staple of the BUILD hackathon for the last few years. It started as an idea from one church: how might we make church services in English accessible to someone speaking any other language? Four years later, Breeze Translate serves hundreds of churches and Christian ministries every week. At BUILD 26 they're coming back with a similar but different question…

Language translation is just one aspect of breaking down barriers to accessing church and being welcomed into Christian community. Over the hackathon weekend, Breeze wants to invite you to explore with them how this tool could help people with other access needs, supporting those with learning disabilities and neurodiversities to engage with church services.

This is at the early stages of thinking. Over the weekend, Breeze is looking for people with a background in both building transformational technology and special educational needs and disabilities, who'd be interested in workshopping, prototyping, and exploring different avenues for how this could be built into the tool.

Behind the scenes, Breeze runs on NestJS, Google Cloud Run, backed by the Google Generative API.

Listen First

Home for Good support families facing complex, long-term challenges. Their Family Support Managers are the main contact for the family as they come alongside them. The team meets face to face with every family to hear their needs and goals, and those initial conversations become the 'Family Picture,' the overview which guides the support plans that Home for Good provides through the help of the local church.

At BUILD 26, Home for Good wants to prototype a new tool for the Family Support Managers called 'Listen First,' a secure, AI-assisted documentation tool that helps them spend less time writing notes and more time listening. With permission, the team member could record the conversation, securely upload and transcribe it, and then generate a first draft of a Family Picture from the transcript, with Home for Good's values of hope and compassion embedded throughout.

Under the hood, you'll be working with Microsoft AI services and Safe Families' bespoke CRM, built on Laravel. This project builds on two previous AI-based projects from BUILD, both of which have since gone into full-time use, helping the Home for Good team reach and support families earlier, before they hit crisis point.

Mendable

Full description coming soon.

Mendable is a platform to enable the circular economy in repair, connecting repair cafés, charity shops and skilled fixers, and targeting the 62 million tonnes of e-waste produced globally each year. At BUILD 26, the team wants to build the first MVPs: mining an existing 300,000-item repair dataset to work out what good repair data actually looks like, and prototyping a tool that identifies an item and narrows down its likely repair needs.

Prayer Flare

A PrayerFlare prototype was created at BUILD 2025. It enables Christians to find each other in and near their workplaces, meet, pray, and run outreach events together. This solves a problem many Christians face in finding fellowship with other believers outside their Sunday church setting. It contains many building blocks, including private invitations, workplace Places, Circles, small recurring Hearths, prayer rhythms, and check-ins, but these currently feel like separate features rather than one simple journey.

At BUILD 26, the team wants to turn the prototype into a viable product pilot. The goal is to build on existing infrastructure so that someone who receives an invitation can join the right workplace fellowship, find other Christians, and take part in a first shared group activity in under ten minutes. Rather than building new features, the focus is on turning existing capabilities into one easy-to-understand, end-to-end journey, from invitation and onboarding, through a coordinator setting up their fellowship, to a guided first prayer or rhythm together. The work must be done without touching authentication or privacy controls, so it can be safely tested with real users straight after the hackathon.

This is expected to become a live Transform Work product in 2027. The rollout starts with a technical alpha across 3 to 5 Cambridge fellowships this September and October, followed by BUILD 26, then a closed beta across around 40 Cambridge groups from November. Early 2027 will focus on beta improvement and scaling, before a broader launch at Spring Harvest at Easter, and full transition of existing Transform Work organisations to PrayerFlare by the end of 2027.

If you want to help Christians find each other, pray together, and transform their workplaces, join this team and help shape the journey that gets them there.

Progress Tracker Engagement Tool

Full description coming soon.

The Progress Tracker is IJM's interactive world map, letting supporters zoom in on the places where IJM works, and read about the work being done there to stop slavery and violence. At BUILD 26, IJM UK wants to explore a new version of the tool, something that makes the experience more engaging and more specific to the kind of supporter using it, whether that's a heatmap, a quiz, gamification or something the team comes up with instead.

The Common Good Devotional

The Kingdom Democracy Project has built a daily devotional called Common Good, focused on different aspects of the public sector. Each week takes a theme, with 7 days of scripture, devotional content, and prayer points exploring that theme, across a 52-week cycle. The eventual goal is to engage 364 individual Christians working across public life, from war and displacement to forestry, fisheries, economic policy, and welfare reform, and help them reflect on how their daily work connects to their faith.

At BUILD 26, the team would explore how this material could be packaged and distributed through social media. There's already a working progressive web app with daily content and notifications, backed by an API that two other projects already consume for sharing the material elsewhere. The hackathon would build on this by exploring how to automate posting daily reflections or prayer points to social media, in ways that encourage people to pause and reflect without needing to subscribe to Common Good directly. There's likely an agentic angle to this distribution work that the team could dig into.

After the hackathon, the project will continue to live within the Kingdom Democracy Project, currently run by a small group exploring what God has put on their hearts.

The app is built in Python and TypeScript, and uses the Bible Study MCP.

Whatever You Do

Full description coming soon.

Whatever You Do is a digital workbook that walks someone through discerning their calling, built on an existing in-person course and centred on a gifts and talents tool, you rank your own strengths, then five or more people who know you rate you anonymously, and the gap between the two provides insight. At BUILD 26, the project wants to take a working prototype and develop it, building that tool as a production-ready standalone with accounts, saved results, and the ability to survey others.