Inspiration

A social science class got us thinking about the lack of green space in cities and what it actually costs communities, individually, socially, environmentally, and in terms of food access. That led us to a simple question: could people's everyday hobbies, like gardening, be a meaningful lever for social good? Forage came out of that conversation.

What We Learned

This project was as much about collaboration as it was about code. We divided work around what each person was good at: design and product thinking, API and map integration, and data sourcing and cleaning. Having clearly defined lanes made us move faster and kept things from falling through the cracks.

How We Built It

We started with shared documents and wireframes before writing any code, so everyone had a clear picture of what we were building. From there, we cross-referenced Chicago open data to identify underutilized urban spaces. We layered in the Chicago Park District's garden database, geocoded addresses with Nominatim, and wrote a proximity deduplication algorithm to make sure every map pin represents a distinct location. The app itself is built in React Native with a Supabase backend.

Challenges

Keeping up with each other's changes was harder than expected. Git helps, but it doesn't replace communication. The times we made the most progress were when we were having regular check-ins and talking through what everyone was working on . That kept the codebase and the team in sync.

https://github.com/erosario19/Forage