Caring for Caregivers

Inspiration

In August 2014, at the age of 28, one of our team member's mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and she became a caregiver. All of the other people her age were worried about graduate school, starting their families, or advancing their careers, but she was thrown into a world full of doctors appointments and estate planning. This was not something she had planned for or knew what to do. She had very few resources and felt very alone and looking back, she really wished she would have had more help and allowed herself to be helped.

What it does

Our business provides a service to schedule and hire individuals and businesses in the community to assist caregivers in daily activities.

How we built it

We used a website creator called Wix to produce a easy and convenient resource that a large selection of the people will be able to access.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we ran into when brainstorming our hack was that our team lacked coding skills. We worked around this by finding a website creator that was easy to use and created an aesthetically pleasing website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team we are proud of creating our first, usable website. We worked together to highlight our strengths and collaborate with our diverse backgrounds. We believe that our business is something we could immediately start working on after leaving the hackathon. We each have the resources to start building businesses and adding them to our database. We each have a different connections to reach out to different patient populations and get this in the hands of caregivers.

What we learned

Hackathons are not about who can code and who has the most diverse skill sets. They are about being able to work together as a team and utilize the strengths of everyone's backgrounds to create a solution to a problem you are passionate about. It is more about the experience and learning than having a usable product at the end.

What's next for Caring for Caregivers

Caring for Caregivers would like to expand its services to other zip codes. We are hoping to create an app in the future to make our services more accessible.