Fridge Finder

A resource to help connect Boston Community Fridges to the people of Greater Boston

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Fridge Finder

The Greater Boston Food Bank reported that the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact in that food insecurity rise among children 117%. A Feeding America survey illustrated that the state of Massachusetts had the greatest increase of food insecurity nationally due to the pandemic, a 59% increase. Community Fridges have been an effective community effort to help fight food insecurity. As of now, community fridges can now be found in Allston, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, Somerville, and other neighborhoods.

However, we notice that information about these community fridges are distributed through either social media or word of mouth. So this means that important information can easily be missed through the busy social media feed or by not having the app installed in the first place. Fridge finder help breaks that gap of missing information by connecting people to fridges in one clean simple platform

The impact of increased connectivity would lead to:

  • An increase of information between people and the product
  • Hopefully to more donations

The Team

  • Priyanka Bandekar - Graduate Student at Northeastern University
  • Eliana Lopez - Math student at Simmons University

Inspiration

The only way to know information about the community fridges in Boston is through either word of mouth or following each Instagram page of the fridge. However, fridge finder makes this solution more accessible to individuals who may not have Instagram with an online web application.

What it does

Simply, it connects individuals to community fridges in Boston in several ways:

  • Shows them the location of the fridge
  • How well stock the fridge is approximately
  • What items are approximately in the fridge
  • How to contribute to the community fridges
  • Connects users to volunteer opportunities

How we built it

Prototyped with Figma and attempted to construct the app with a react-native front end and flask backend.

Design Process

We did research to find any competitors or resources that offer the same service and there was no direct competitor exactly, however, our app did take inspiration from other community impactful apps such as food pantries

Challenges we ran into

Learning react-native for the first time for my part.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a great concrete design of an impactful project

What we learned

We learned more in depth about the design though process and creating a project without leaving the scope of our mission. I learned a lot about react-native and I find it fun to use and learn. I also learned how to connect flask and react together.

What's next for Fridge Finder

There is a lot more to be done with Fridge Finder in terms of design, such as making user surveys, and finding out what other feature may be needed to make this app a bit more accessible. Other features that would need to be designed include how people can volunteer, such as their time, collecting bulk donations, and cleaning the fridge.

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