ChariFood

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  Shreya Tupakula (left), Saarika Virkar (right)

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Inspiration

Statistically 40% of U.S. food is wasted each year and 1 in 6 Americans do not know where their next meal is coming from. This overwhelming fact inspired us to initiate change that will slowly grow to serve our neighborhood, the state, the country, and eventually the world. I have lived in India for 7 years and have seen poverty at its worst. Hopeless mothers and ailing fathers held their malnourished children, begging for money to pay for their first square meal in days, maybe weeks. Saarika has volunteered with multiple organizations that provide the necessary nutrition to those who are unable to afford proper meals. Combining both Saarika's experience in America with mine in India, we decided we wanted to make an impact nationally and gradually expand our services globally. As millennials, we are known for having an appetite for luxury that has driven us to neglect the environment and those suffering from poverty and lack of food. It is an instilled mindset that we will not live long enough to experience the consequences of depletion of resources. However, because of the baby boom and the constantly improving geriatric care, there is a possibility that we will witness suffering along with the generations to come. There are many environmental protection programs but the waste of food is an indirect problem that goes unnoticed by many. Our app's purpose is to create awareness of this issue while redistributing this otherwise trashed food to those who are in desperate need of it.

Our Solution

    ChariFood allows charities to discover restaurants who are willing to donate their excess food. The purpose of this app is to facilitate communication between the donor and the receiver. While the Internet does provide a plethora of information, it does not guarantee that both parties are looking for the same thing. By registering, both restaurants and charities will be able to connect with each other, the restaurant supplying the charity with much needed nutrition and in turn receiving publicity. Though this app is a small step towards a big goal, multiple small steps will add up to eventually accomplishing that goal previously considered impossible. 
  We built this app through the open-source web application MIT App Inventor to start turning our dream of a poverty-free world into a reality. Ease of use was our main focus. To be able to quickly register and view information of the opposite party would increase efficiency and encourage users who are not technologically savvy to participate. Following this ideology, we decided to only have 5 pages: the homepage, restaurant registration, charity registration, list of restaurants, and list of charities. Each page has button(s) that lead you to another page and there is clear instructions that specify each page’s purpose. Appeal was another factor that we carefully considered. We tried our best to make the pages as appealing to the user. 

Challenges

 Neither Saarika nor I have much experience with computer programming so it was a little difficult to understand how exactly to manipulate the app inventor to achieve the purpose we determined. However, we formed a plan: first we finished building the basic features of the app and then researched how to bring all of them together to function as the app we imagined. We explored multiple ways to solve our problem and found one that worked best for our cause.

Next Steps

We plan to add features that make communication and transportation of food increasingly convenient. We hope to integrate a GPS tracker that will display a map so the charities and restaurants can gauge the distance between each other. We also hope to include a phone application. These features will reduce the need of the external applications and make it more advantageous since the user will not have to switch through apps repeatedly. Competition is ultimately what drives us in this society. In order to utilize this drive to aid those suffering from poverty, another idea we came up with is “ChariPoints”; restaurants will gain points every time they donate to a charity. These points can be used to publicize their restaurants and mainly serve as an incentive for restaurants to participate.

Lessons Learned

Though at first, we leaned back and thought about whether one app could really make a difference, we realized that the many big projects that make an incredible impact start out small. Aside from learning basic coding and video editing skills, we’ve also improved our communication skills, public speaking, and ability to think outside the box. This app challenge gave us insight on how to pursue a solution for a large-scale problem and taught us skills that we will definitely utilize in the future.

Built With

• mit-app-inventor