cliu0013 / our-home-treehacks

Empower the community to help the less fortunate by creating a platform which allows outreach shelters connect to one another as well as the members of the community.

OUR HOME

• @Protocol Flutter Chat App
• CheckBook API for easy payments / invoices
• ArcGIS map to visualize Charity locations

Inspiration

Homelessness, food insecurity & mental health problems are on the rise in our post Covid 19 world. Community shelters in major cities do not have the resources or vacancies to accommodate the growing number of vulnerable populations.

Addressing these issues and seeking to mitigate the fallout before they become full blown crises, the most prudent course of action. To assist with this present and looming crisis, we have developed the Our Home app.

Our goal is to connect the shelters and the members of our communities together. We are involved in the fight against homelessness, food insecurity and mental health issues and other social problems.

This app is our way to make sure members of our community have a shelter above them, food to eat and access to basic help as the need arises, and support each other within their own means.

What it does

Our Home app connects local charities to community members that wish to open up their homes and hearts and offer assistance to other members of the community who may be experiencing homelessness or hunger.

Members of the community who are willing to offer a place to sleep, a meal, a place to shower, a ride, etc. can offer their services up to local charities who are normally operating at max capacity. This allows any overflow in service that needs to be diverted by the charities to members of the community who can directly assist those that need the help.

Charities can request members who sign up to provide someone a place to sleep, a hot meal, etc if the member accepts the call to help.

The app also allows members of a community to make donations to their local charities at the simple click of a button with minimal effort. They can easily visualize all the charity and help centers that offer help to the needy near them and easily find out which charity needs what kind of help.

How we built it

Frontend: Flutter (mobile app), HTML/JS (web page); Backend: Node.JS; DB: Firebase Realtime Database; Hosting & Storage: Google Cloud Firebase; API: Ezri ArcGIS, Checkbook, @Protocol; Design: Wireframe, Miro, Canva

Challenges we ran into

Getting Flutter in Android studio to work correctly with respect to the @ Company’s Protocol proved to be quite cumbersome, but we eventually got things to work as intended. The ArcGIS API works more smoothly for JavaScript and web development in general, so we made the switch from using Python to JavaScript.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a simple way to overlay many layers of information on a map to help visualize locations of places where charitable work is being done. A way to visualize the location of users who are willing to help people in need. All using the arcGIS mapping which

We built a way to integrate this with the checkbook api to allow people to make donations directly and easily to local charities of their choosing.

We built a mobile app that allows us to navigate the main desired functionality of users and charities interacting with each other to help out people within the community who need a helping hand.

What we learned

Use Miro for Agile Development; Host static website on Firebase; Use ArcGIS API for Javascript; Using the @Protocol for decentralized and secure communication; Using the CheckBook API to easily send / receive money over email

What's next for Our Home

We wish to refine some front end user interface components, improve the UX/UI experience and deploy, to start testing how people will actually utilize the app. Have a matching algorithm to match the homeowners with the homeless from their charity of choice.

"Try it out" links

Github: https://github.com/ProjectsByJackHe/our-home-treehacks

Firebase server: https://treehacksdemo.web.app/