Campfire.

Every day in the clinic ends the same way. Fellows gather, check in and talk about how the day went with people who understand them better than anyone else. Then treatment ends, the routine disappears and the peers are scattered. Many fellows face the months after discharge feeling isolated, at exactly the time when they most need recognition and support.

Yes We Can Clinics wanted to close that gap with a digital campfire that felt like an extension of the clinic's own community, not a generic social app. The people using it would be in one of the most vulnerable phases of their lives, so the app had to feel calm and protected, and be easy for anyone to use. Not everyone finds it easy to put feelings into writing, so fellows needed to be able to share their stories by speaking. The app had to help each fellow find someone who genuinely understood their situation. The clinic's team needed a way to manage the platform and make it part of their aftercare. And because the app would hold personal, health-related information about people in the EU, privacy and GDPR compliance had to be built in from the start.

We built a team that covered every discipline the product would need, so Yes We Can Clinics worked with a single team from first concept to release. Campfire was developed together with the people it serves. Its requirements came from psychiatrists, psychologists, expert-by-experience counsellors and clinical staff, and from people who had completed clinical treatment themselves.

The campfire metaphor became the backbone of both the concept and the visual language: a warm, quiet place to return to at the end of the day. We kept the screens deliberately simple, with clear navigation and minimal cognitive load.

Spoken messages are at the heart of Campfire, so we chose to build separate native apps for iOS and Android, which gave our engineers full control over audio, performance and platform behaviour. Behind the apps is a back end on AWS that manages user accounts, peer connections, messaging and media storage.

Alongside the mobile apps we built a web-based admin panel, which gives the clinic's team the tools to manage fellows and run Campfire as part of their aftercare process. We delivered the project in two-week sprints, each ending with a working increment that the client reviewed and accepted.

Leavingstone delivered Campfire as a complete product: UX/UI and visual design, native iOS and Android apps, the back end and the admin panel, with one team accountable for every layer. Development began in July 2020 and ran in two-week sprints, each reviewed and accepted by the client.

The client received the full source code, assets and documentation at the end of every sprint, so ownership was never in question. Personal data has been handled in line with GDPR under a formal data processing agreement from the start.