An Australian not-for-profit · built in Sydney
Help that actually picks up.
Text it, call it, or message on WhatsApp. Any language. No name, no account, no questions you don’t want to answer.
Moreneta is a free AI companion that finds the food, shelter, health and crisis services near you that are open right now — and tells you how to actually get there. A working prototype is live; the public launch is ahead of us.
Need someone right now?
Moreneta is not publicly available yet, so please use these services — they are free, and they are staffed by people who can help today. If someone is in immediate danger, call 000.
- 000 Police, fire, ambulance — immediate danger
- 13 11 14 Lifeline — crisis support, 24/7
- 13 92 76 13YARN — Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander crisis support, 24/7
- 1800 737 732 1800RESPECT — domestic, family & sexual violence, 24/7
- 1800 55 1800 Kids Helpline — ages 5–25, 24/7
- 1800 152 152 Link2home — NSW homelessness, 24/7; full support 9am–10pm daily
The problem
The information exists. Reaching it doesn’t work.
Australia has thousands of services for people facing homelessness. What’s missing is a way to get from a moment of crisis to the one door that’s actually open, right now, near you.
- Most people are navigating this for the first time. St Vincent de Paul Society NSW reports that one in three people who sought its assistance in Greater Sydney over the past year were doing so for the first time — they don’t know what exists or where to start.
- Directories are lists, not action. People still have to call ahead, work out opening hours and figure out transport themselves. Wrong numbers and closed doors erode trust, and every extra step is friction someone in crisis cannot absorb.
- Language is a barrier at the worst possible moment. One in four Australians speaks a language other than English at home, yet most services are English-only or depend on interpreters with long delays.
- Help is hardest to find after hours. Most services and their information lines run business hours, while housing and safety crises frequently unfold at night.
- Nobody holds a picture of unmet demand. Where people look for help and don’t find it goes unrecorded, so services, funders and government plan with anecdote instead of evidence.
“La Moreneta — the little dark one. Her colour was never carved in. It came from centuries of candle smoke, from people arriving with something heavy and lighting a flame anyway.”
Where the name comes from — the Virgin of Montserrat, in Catalonia
Events
Upcoming
AI for Social Enterprise Hackathon
- When
- Monday 21 – Tuesday 22 September 2026, 9:00am – 5:00pm
- Where
- UTS Startups, 3 Broadway, Ultimo NSW 2007
Two days building AI for social impact, hosted with UTS Startups as part of Spark Festival (21–27 September 2026). Registration has closed — the event listing is here for reference.
Stay in touch
Follow what we’re building.
Occasional updates on progress and the public launch. No more than that. The form opens in a new page.
We’ll only ever email you updates about Moreneta — nothing else, and no one else gets your address. How we handle it is in our privacy policy.
Partnerships and media
If you’d like to talk about a pilot, funding, data sharing or media, write to us directly at hello@moreneta.org. A person reads it.