Inspiration
The COVID-19 crisis brought a huge impact on the economy. Millions of people lost their jobs, and food security problems worsened. The demand for food banks increased significantly, while their ability to meet demand has plummeted due sourcing and distribution difficulties. With the lockdown and movement restrictions in place, access to the food banks becomes harder for elders, people who have disabilities and no access to cars.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, food banks have not been able to allow volunteers into their facilities. With this site volunteers can continue supporting their local food banks.
Furthurmore, Feeding America projects that 42 million people (1 in 8), including 13 million children (1 in 6), may experience food insecurity in 2021. Significant racial disparities in food insecurity which existed before COVID-19 remain in the wake of the pandemic. Feeding America projects that 21% of Black individuals (1 in 5) may experience food insecurity in 2021, compared to 11% of white individuals (1 in 9).
This is not just an issue in North America, but globally. Right now, over 821 million people in the world are hungry. And it's estimated that an additional 2 billion people will be undernourished by 2050. Our app hopes to make an impact by tackling food insecurity, reduce food waste, and support marginalized communities and individuals, by streamlining food donation pickup and drop-off.
What it does
FoodDrop is a desktop application used to schedule pickups and deliveries for both Food Banks and those in need. Users can see what food banks in their area accept donations for. The desktop application will Match people in need with donations based on location. The Donations are stored at foodbanks nearby. Users can Donate or access donations on the app and indicate Pickup, Drop-off or Delivery. Finally, Volunteers deliver or pick up donations.
How we built it
We used HTML, CSS and Javascript to build the site.
Challenges we ran into
As we didnt have teammates going in, it was difficult at first to find teammates, as we ended up having one person drop off in the beginning stages. We were also in different time zones, and it was difficult to communicate at times to stay on the same page. One of our members was also mostly a business oriented student with not much coding experience, so it was definitely a learning curve to do that. However, we believe we were able to mitigate this by staying up to date on discord.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of finishing the site as it is currently, and being able to have done that in short amount of time. We also are proud of the solution, as we believe we were able to create a unique solution to the increasing problem of food insecurity.
What we learned
We learned the importance of perseverance, and one of our members learned more about front end and using github desktop, which was a great step as a beginner!
What's next for Food Drop
We also created a prototype for the mobile app, which we would have also created if there was more time. We would have also created more detailed info like the database and went into depth with the matching of foodbanks in the area if we had more time to do so.
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