Charitize | Devpost

Volunteer for events run by that charity
Charities page
Connecting crypto wallet

Inspiration

Imagine this: you are at a grocery store, doing your weekly groceries when you come across another donation poster. This week, it is for hungry children. You reflect on growing up in a lower income household, where putting food on the table was more of a luxury than a necessity. After years of hard work, you finally break out of poverty, and you no longer have to worry about affording bare necessities. When the cashier finishes scanning all your items, she asks you if you would like to donate to charity. Remembering the days you went to sleep hungry, you donate $25 and leave the store hopeful...

But does all the money you donate to charities actually end up going towards the cause?

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for donated money to end up in the pockets of corrupted charity officials who use the money for personal gain. According to the Tampa Bay Times, "for 50 U.S. charities, less than four percent of their funds were used for charity-related activities. The remaining 96 percent went towards the paychecks of charity founders, operators, and solicitors."

Constantly hearing about ongoing and unresolved social issues inspired my team to create Charitize, a web application that allows transparency between charities and donors.

What it does

Charitize is an easy, three way platform that allows charities to maintain their integrity and relationship with stakeholders, helps donors ensure their money is going towards the right cause, and is an easy navigation site for driven individuals to browse volunteering opportunities. As mentioned, there are three types of users: charity organizations, donors and volunteers.

Charities: Charity organizations can create their own pages, made for a specific cause. Each charity has a corresponding governance token. They also do not have access to the funds / treasury whatsoever. Each charity page includes a section about their mission, list of upcoming volunteer opportunities, current treasury meter, and a redeem page for volunteers.

Donors: Donors can choose to donate for charities that are close to them. They donate to a charity’s treasury, which is inaccessible to everyone, except the volunteers, when they redeem their tokens.

Volunteers: Volunteers can volunteer for different charities; once they are approved, they can put in volunteer hours, which are approved by admins, or other volunteers - based off of the charity settings. These hours can be redeemed for a monetary value, once the charity’s treasury is opened.

How we built it

After deciding on our idea, we used Figma for the prototyping. Then we created the frontend using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React. To connect it to the backend, we used Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was coding the frontend. Although we had a really good design on Figma, it was quite challenging and time consuming to translate that into code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although it was also one of our biggest challenges, we are proud of our UX/UI design. We spent a lot of time on it and we think that in the end, it looks great!

What we learned

Many of our team members picked up a new language and/or framework from this hackathon. We were each able to leverage our own strengths, and extend our current skills further by picking up a new tool!