Climb

Inspiration

17.4% of adults in the United States qualify for government aid.

Of them, only 13.7% of the population received SNAP, a tool designed to promote financial stability, in 2015

This huge disparity leaves thousands of people unaware of the resources that they need to help establish their financial independence. Women in financially abusive situations, first generation adults, immigrants, and other underprivileged people often feel alone and overwhelmed by the landscape in this country to get started on their earning journeys. Our goal was to close this gap and give people the support they need to find stability.

What it does

Climb hosts workshops that help bridge the gap of knowledge for financial literacy. These live workshops allow users to meet people in similar conditions to them and create a supportive community while also learning about how to navigate the financial landscape. Our AI-powered chat bot virtual assistant provides information and guidance on Welfare programs. The Chrome extension functionality allows the assistant to follow you to all of the application websites you need and gives you step by step tutorials and answer your questions as you go. We even create machine learning based personalized suggestions to match each user with a financial advisor or social worker depending on their current situation. We also made sure that this program is entirely accessible by offering several different languages and using this information to support each element of the product.

We aim to equip individuals with the knowledge and skills necessary to make informed decisions about their personal finances, which leads to greater stability and success. This includes budgeting, saving, investing, and managing debt. By combining the knowledge and effort of financial advisors, mentors, and social workers, users are able to receive a step-by-step guide to social wellbeing and financial literacy. Climb helps build and bring this community together.

How we built it

The front end of the website is built with javascript, HTML, and CSS to create a unique and efficient user experience. The database is hosted by Google Cloud's mysql platform. We connect to it using google colab to use python as the backend. Machine learning is powered by scikit learn, including unsupervised kmeans clustering and semi-supervised decision trees.

Challenges we ran into

We were inexperienced with full stack web development. This was a big learning curve as we tried to connect our back end to the front end. Learning tools like Flask helped. We also had to make sure to be widely accessible as we considered people who might not have access to the resources they need to take advantage of our platform. This required researching ways that underprivileged individuals can access the internet and considering public resources to support them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The machine learning framework to pair users with advisors based on their input in the registration process is what we are most proud of. This helps make sure that every user is getting targeted assistance from a true expert on what they need based on their condition.

What we learned

We learned a lot about collaboration. This included bringing together different languages and ide's to put together one complete project. We also learned about project development.