Share&Care

The connection between people and food banks

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Inspiration

We noticed there was a huge gap between connecting people with food banks and vice versa, leading to both food shortages and food wastes. This is especially apparent on UW when at the end of every year lots of students end up with a large excess of money on their dining account, that could easily be transferred to help for food banks. Thus, we wanted to work on combating this within local communities to make information more readily available and an easier process for all parties involved (Perfect for track #2: Local Community!). Here are the main points of each party we factored in:

Foodbanks

  • As a food bank, I want to know what food I am running low on.
  • As a food bank, I want to let people know what food I need.
  • As a food bank, I want to enter items to our data set as we get the items.
  • As a food bank, I want to see when items expire.

Consumers

  • As a consumer, I want to know the nearest food bank is to me.
  • As a consumer, I want to know what food the food bank is offering.

Contributors

  • As a contributor, I want to know what food local banks needs.
  • As a contributor, I want to know the nearest food bank to me.

What it does

Try it out on GitHub Pages! For full affect, choose The Food Bank at St. Mary's or log in as marys[at]gmail.com with swehacks

For the general users, the website allows you to search for nearby food banks and gives information about what food is available as well as what food they need to be donated.

In the top right corner, you can also log in as a food bank. This brings you to a dashboard showing stats about how your food status is doing, as well as allowing you to switch to a page to edit the food data currently stored.

How we built it

We used a React framework and a Firebase database to build the website, using GitHub to work on various components independently.

Challenges we ran into

Most of our team was new to React, and so there was a little bit of a learning curve. The biggest inhibitor of the project though was, of course, the time, having only roughly 5 hours to code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working on a product that has such potential to be impactful in our communities, and having a solidly functioning prototype to present. There's still plenty more to do but we were happy with how well React worked.

What we learned

Learned how to use React! As well as connect the website to the Firebase database and being able to auto-populate fields on the website!

What's next for Share&Care

There are lots of possible features (besides improving the current designs and implementations) we could add! Some of the ones we're the most excited about are:

  • Adding a filter for the search function. This could allow users to search for particular foods they need or the foods they have to donate.
  • Adding user profiles. This would allow for better interactions between the food banks and the community, for example letting the food banks send out a notification if they're in an extreme shortage of a particular item.

-Fab Four Fems

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