CareConnect

Inspiration

We approached this hackathon wanting to positively impact as many people as possible. As college students, there are so many valuable resources available to us provided by universities and local government. However, these resources are hardly marketed online and as a result, thousands of students aren't aware of assistance programs that are specifically made for them. This is a huge issue! To solve this, we wanted to create a application that could consolidate community resources in a user's area to simplify the painful process of researching programs and services.

What it does

The website is made for both users who want to search for services and organizations that want to promote what they offer. The organizations we had in mind using this service were non-profits and programs geared towards providing financial aid, legal services, food assistance, housing assistance, anything of the sort. The site allows an organization to create an account to upload information about any specific resource they offer. Any user navigating to our site is directed to input their location information and the site will pull up any resource in their city from our database.

How we built it

Our frontend stack was React bootstrapped with Vite, React Router and Tailwind with DaisyUI. We opted to choose a more simplistic stack to something like Next which while powerful wasn't something we were particularly comfortable with. Choosing DaisyUI followed this decision process as well, simplicity to something like Shadcn was more justified.

The backend we chose was firebase which allowed us to focus on our frontend implementation with the plethora of built in solutions firebase provides. We took advantage of firebase Auth, Storage and Documents primarily to support our CRUD operations.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were some poor data modeling decisions especially early on in the development process. In some instances passing references to documents from our firebase collections were difficult as we'd often be passing them between multiple components at a time. NoSQL DB's can also cause confusion in such short time frames, in the future we will likely use a schema.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we're all really proud of was our ability to kickstart a project that can grow and impact our community in real time. While our app may not be fully fleshed out yet, there is a lot of potential for continual growth and scalability. We're also really passionate about the idea of being a force for good in our community.

What we learned

The whole team learned a lot over the course of this project as we all came in from varying levels of experience. Firebase was the most impactful learning experience in our project. We have never worked with this tool before and being able to use a huge swath of API's after a single day was really exciting. For one of our members, this was their first experience using React and Tailwind so they were able to learn a lot more about front-end development through this project.

What's next for CareConnect

There is so much to CareConnect that we would have loved to expand on if given more time. The main thing we were missing by the end of the project was the ability to update resources. In our brainstorming phase, we were also thinking of incorporating an AI Chatbot feature and a messaging feature to directly talk to organizations. The filtering features of the site also had a lot of potential to create a more personal user experience. We would have loved to be able to filter resources by type (ie. housing or healthcare) and by main demographic so that user’s would have an easier time finding resources that are applicable to them.

Built With

• firebase
• javascript
• react
• tailwindcss