EMPOWER

EMPOWER is a web-app for fostering support and solidarity in the AAPI community.

Comment 1

What is our app?

In the past year, as anti-Asian hate crimes have increased steadily, Asian-Americans increasingly report feeling unsafe in their own hometowns. While hate crimes as a whole actually decreased by 7% in 2020, anti-Asian hate rose by nearly 150%. Disgusted and distressed by our current reality, our team asked ourselves, “How can we help our community feel safe and supported?”

Our answer is EMPOWER. With EMPOWER, we hope to accomplish the following:

  1. Provide a real-time map of hate crime reports by users. Community members can check what areas around them are potentially unsafe and report incidents themselves by interacting with the map.
  2. Create and respond to assistance requests from nearby community members
  3. Allow users to receive text messages with alerts and requests for assistance in their vicinity.
  4. Use data analytics pipelines and visualizations to generate novel insights.
  5. Share data and open-source models with the general public.

We believe that transparency is one of the greatest tools we can leverage against injustice. In creating a platform where information and support are easily accessible, we hope that EMPOWER will pave the way for a safer and more connected community.

How we built it

We used React and React-Bootstrap on the frontend, Firestore for our database, and Python for our data analysis.

We started by building out our reporting and requests pages, before moving on to data visualization and general aesthetics of our app.

Challenges we ran into

We had some difficulty visualizing our data and generating mock-data to visualize. It was also some of our team-members' first in-depth experience with React and Javascript, so there were a lot of notation and implementation details we had to learn on the fly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of the reports/requests functionality and our visualized data! We kept working at it and really made something functional in the end.

What's next for EMPOWER

We want to build out a functional messaging component. Although we tried for a long time, we couldn't actually get our messaging functionality to work. This is definitely the next big step for us. We would also clean up our code. As a result of the fast-paced nature of hackathons in general, our code is definitely less than optimal so cleaning it up would be a good next step for performance/deployment.

Share this project:

Updates