CUNY Pantry Finder

At-a-glance information about the nearest CUNY food pantries to get students the food they need as quickly, efficiently, and easily as possible.

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Background

CUNY’s essential resources provide students essential needs in order to promote a healthy environment for education. This year’s CTP Hacks competition tasks us with increasing awareness and usage of through digital means. Our team decided to focus solely on promoting one of CUNY’s essential resources: food pantries.

Purpose

Hunger and food security is among the top of the list of most unmet essential needs of CUNY college students, especially following the lockdown in 2020. Access to CUNY’s food pantries are limited due to several factors:

  • Lack of a central information hub for all CUNY food pantries
  • Inconsistent information about resource access
  • Constantly changing links without proper updates leads to inability to make contact

About

Our web application aims to combat issues related to food insecurity on CUNY campuses by:

  • Showing and guiding users to the closest food pantry by their location across all of NY
  • Collecting all necessary CUNY food pantry information into one application
  • Sharing this information in a way that makes it as fast and easy to reach a food pantry as possible

Features

Users can:

  • Read information regarding the severity of food insecurity amongst CUNY students, and the importance of promoting food pantry access to combat it
  • Filter closest pantries by borough, appointment needed, or if the pantry is available to all CUNY students Access links to provided pantry information direct from the campuses themselves

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team, we were proud to:

  • Develop a strong vision for a product in a short amount of time
  • Understand each others’ strengths and weaknesses and apply them as best as we could
  • Support each other when things weren’t working out
  • Complete a hackathon for the first time!

Challenges

Some of the challenges we faced were:

  • Time pressure and crunch
  • Inefficient coding (long hours of debugging)
  • Difficulty managing collaborative code
  • Occasional lack of communication

Expanding this project

If we had more time and experience, some features we would have liked to possibly implement include:

  • Include more filters for better user experience
  • Report functionality for outdated information or broken links for better user experience
  • Organize information more neatly via drop down menu
  • Further optimizations to improve speed and simplify UI
  • Implement machine learning / AI features (like a chatbot)

What we learned

This project was a very new experience for all of us, and being able to participate in a hackathon in a less intense environment allowed us to better reflect on this project. As with any collaborative effort, communication, planning, and helping each other out is necessary to success. We wouldn't have gotten anywhere without each other. Despite that, given the fast-paced nature of a hackathon, things won't always work out. We were often frustrated that certain things wouldn't be able to work out in the end, but we instead learned to focus on what we had. This entire event gave us a great look into what the future holds for us, and provided us with much more confidence to tackle our next hackathon!

Thank you!

Collaboral Damage - Ayana Tran, Esmeralda Gonzalez, Kevin Orta, Miguel Luna

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