Food Pantry Finder

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project came from Jessica’s time working for 211, an information and referral service. She would frequently refer clients to local food pantries and witnessed how time-consuming this is to do over the phone. Many details are essential to know to attend: name, dates/times, and address. Considering that a person may need to attend several pantries per week, this amounts to a large time commitment for a client to receive support. What’s more, they are required to organize this information somewhere for them to reference in the future.

We believe that there is a better way for someone who’s asking for help with the search process to be supported.

What it does

To meet our goal, we have developed a command line interface program that asks a user for their location and creates two visualizations of the search results: a list of food pantries and a weekly schedule.

How we built it

We utilized Python’s web-scraping package, Selenium, to convert a user’s provided country and zip code into latitude and longitude coordinates. These coordinates are used by JavaScript’s web-scraper, Puppeteer, to scrape Google Maps for food pantry data. This data is used to make two HTML files for the user: a list of the pantries found and a weekly schedule.

Challenges we ran into

The majority of the challenges we encountered while building this project were directly related to our growing understanding of the technologies we chose to include in our codebase - namely web scraping, and CSV parsing, especially when dealing with dynamic web pages like Google Maps that made web scraping much more intricate.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proudest of how we transformed a brainstorming idea about an issue we both feel strongly about into a working prototype within a month using tools such as Playwright, Selenium, and CSV-parser that we had no experience working with prior.

What we learned

Through this project, we not only built a better understanding of the intricacies of working with location data but also a great deal about web scraping and its uses for building incredibly functional applications and software in the future.

What's next for Food Pantry Finder

The first major plan for Food Pantry Finder is to take our application and officially host it on an accessible website so that it can be used by folks anywhere who are experiencing food insecurity. Apart from that, we have a handful of features and updates that we plan to continue building out including a user-friendly UI, adding the ability to sync the created schedule files with a user’s personal calendar app (e.g. Google Calendar, Outlook, etc.), and accessibility features.

Built With

• csv
• csv-parser
• fs
• javascript
• node.js
• pip
• playwright
• puppeteer
• python
• selenium