ATLConnect

Connecting our city with an accessible and aggregated list of resources geared towards building community.

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Inspiration

We are Cecilia Muniz, Talha Ansari, Ebtesam Aman, and Sarah Masry. As students at Georgia State University, we see everyday people in our community struggling with homelessness, food insecurity, and lack of access to other basic necessities. We understand how difficult it can be to not only live without the connections and resources necessary for everyday life but to also struggle to find them for many people in our community. We recognize how important the accessibility of community organizations, events, and resources is to the people who call the city of Atlanta home. This inspired us to come up with a solution to this problem, and it led us to build a website called ATLConnect.com to help improve engagement and access in our community.

What it does

The website provides the user with information about shelters, food banks, volunteer opportunities, educational opportunities, and more. It uses Google's Apps Script to scrape the web to find community resources that will be put on a map and presented to the user. By collecting information on city-specific resources for fostering community, resource distribution, and service, ATLConnect can serve as a quick and accessible way for people to find and connect with their community to take advantage of the resources available to them.

How we built it

We built it through React and Google Apps Script. The data for our project was found on dca.ga.gov.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were front-end design, especially since we were relatively inexperienced with that aspect of development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As first-time hackers, we're proud of how far we went into the project and how we learned languages and tools within hours to bring our idea to life.

What we learned

We learned how to collaborate on Git Hub and how to use languages like CSS and HTML to build a website.

What's next for ATLConnect

We will continue to work on this project to collect more information, backend support for the community forum, and automate the web scrapping.

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