Inspiration
The first inspiration we used for this project is the Come Back Alive Foundation, which hosts fundraisers to supply Ukrainian Ground, Air, and Marine units with much-needed equipment. We drew ideas from their projects page, which makes it easy to see organizations requesting items and donate to them.
The second inspiration for this project was the Red Cross Blood Drive finder website, which allows users to enter a zip code and see upcoming blood drives in that area.
What it does
FoodFinder is a web application that tracks local food banks, shows their critical requested items, and provides an easy way for citizens to donate to them. It also provides functionality for food banks to directly login into the site and update their requested needs list, allowing for greater interaction between food bank and community.
How we built it
The backend is built on Python and Flask, pulling data from an API and serving it to the frontend. The frontend is regular HTML and CSS with some Bootstrap components.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge that we encountered was the lack of available food bank data for our local area and the United States. It was easy to find data tracking where food banks are, but none that track their critical needs. Thus, to create our proof of concept, we used an API tracking needs of food banks in the UK.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What we learned
For all but one member of our team, this was our first hackathon! We learned how to collaborate on live code, use GitHub, and use unfamiliar technologies like Flask and Bootstrap.
What's next for FoodFinder
If we were to expand FoodFinder, we would probably start by expanding our data and establishing our platform based on food banks in our local area. We could start by scraping food banks from OpenStreetMaps, then reaching out to them so they could register on our platform and input their critical needs.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.