Carrot- providing food for better thoughts

Inspiration

Issue: The majority of US public and private grade schools do not serve healthy breakfasts and lunches to students, negatively impacting their ability to learn. These impacts include behavioral issues, short-term thinking, lack of motivation, disengagement, absenteeism, and more. Additionally, some students eat ⅓ of their entire year’s worth of meals at schools, with studies showing these students are more likely to gain weight than other students.

Root Cause: Local and state governments often take money out of their classroom budgets due to the lack of subsidies from the federal government. Every dollar take out for these failing meal programs is a dollar taken away from the classroom. We believe schools should not have choose between a student’s academic or nutritional needs.

Solution: Our vision is to radically change this system, giving funding back to the classrooms to keep the focus on education, while providing a healthy foundation for learning. By partnering with local farms, grocers, and businesses, we can provide fresh produce for our schools. But why will businesses do this? 20% of produce never makes it to market due to “cosmetic” reasons. By purchasing from this 20%, we not only can receive better food for cheaper prices, we also offer the businesses new profit opportunities, while also reducing overall waste.

What it does

We built a web browser that explains our mission and provides a way for businesses and schools to get involved.

How we built it

We built the framework of the browser using django. We developed the front end of the website using HTML and CSS. We created a Google form for schools to request food from businesses, and a google form for businesses to request food from schools. The responses from the Google forms go to a Google Sheet. We used the Google Drive API to access the data from the Google Sheet.