Inspiration
When I was in high school and middle school, I was an active member of the GSA and a student-run nonprofit that provided free tutoring to students K-12 in all subjects. When I got to college, I've unfortunately found it more difficult to get involved because of being remote. I don't know what's available or where to begin looking.
I was hanging out with my friend this summer who volunteers with a number of different activism organizations. At the time, they were working with a medical truck during the July as well as spending a couple days a week at anti-facism protests. Their organization couldn't find a great place to advertise. They didn't know how to build a website and there aren't any other platforms conducive to that form of work. ChangeCentral would have solved all their problems
What it does
ChangeCentral makes it easier to get involved and get help. The platform is geared towards being a bit of a matchmaking service between people looking to get involved in organizations and the organizations themselves. It provides a centralized platform where nonprofits, charities, and social activism organizations can provide information on their activities, planned events, and volunteering positions while providing contact information, donation information, and a basic rundown of their work.
How we built it
We built it using node.js on the backend and react with plain javascript on the frontend. We collaborated using git, splitting onto two branches (backend and frontend) and regularly pushing to and pulling from main.
Challenges we ran into
Although we started out with 4 people, two had to leave within the first hour or so due to external conflicts. At around 9:00 PM, upon hitting a road block with the http request cors and credential modes, the third one of us dropped out. Additionally, nodemailer (the package we used to send emails to reset the password and confirm account) would claim to have sent an email when it was not received. Consistently losing our team members was a struggle.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud we have a working product by the end of this. We're proud of our idea, the potential it has and the enthusiasm we have. We're proud of the things we learned at workshops and over the course of the project.
What we learned
- Sonali -> Sonali had never used mongoDB before and had never programed in plain node.js so this was a learning experience for her. She learned that she prefers typescript over plain javascript due to the type-checking. She has also learned that coding for 12 hours straight with a single 15 minute lunch break is kind of a cool buzz 🐝
What's next for ChangeCentral
- Finish development so all features currently planned work (ie. uploading images, editing on the platform, etc)
- Implement search algorithms and filter functions so people can more specifically look at organizations that live near them
- Connect to an online API to verify nonprofit status to ensure all organizations are legitimate
- Allow for networking through the app (nonprofit to nonprofit, volunteer to nonprofit, donor to nonprofit)
- Allow for people to sign-up/apply to volunteer through the site
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