PROtect

Schutter was a Vancouver realtor doing four open houses on a busy Saturday when the door locked behind two men who pushed her into the kitchen. A family who had walked around the side of the property to see the backyard heard the struggle and interrupted it. She spent the next two and a half years looking for a way to protect herself in a job that expects agents to advertise where they will be alone on a Saturday afternoon, and found only fear-based products. PROtect was the answer she built: a circle of contacts she calls PROtectors, alerted on demand or by a timer that runs out. By her October 2018 TechVancouver talk the company was ten people, working with real estate and mortgage brokers, moving into sororities, and holding a federal government contract. She also ran a giveback programme offering the software free to organisations that could not pay, naming Downtown Eastside groups among them. Her framing was corporate responsibility rather than personal caution: employers who send people out alone owe them a duty of care.