Hearth

Login Page
Donation Form
Donation Markers
Location Based Pings
Clusters of Request Markers

Inspiration

My team and I live near the Los Angeles area and homelessness has always been a growing issue in the past few years; especially now during the COVID pandemic, homeless people need our help more than ever.

What it does

Hearth is a crowd sourced app, where anyone, anywhere can post a request for help or a marker to drop down indicating they will help anyone in the surrounding area. People are encouraged to also post requests if they see people in need to bring attention to other people who want to immediately provide relief. It also provides clustering of request markers to show high impact areas for organizations to focus on and give back to the community more easily.

How I built it

We used React-Native to build the front end for our app, and NodeJS for the backend. We also incorporated the Twilio API to ping and notify surrounding helpers that there is help needed in the area. We used the React-Native Maps as the base of our user interaction and have FireBase to store all our data.

Challenges I ran into

We are new to React-Native and getting it up and running was very difficult. We ran into numerous bugs and issues, and that escalated even higher when we started to implement the backend and the map together.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We finished our MVP successfully and proud to say that we can deliver to you a functional product. We made a cluster algorithm that worked really well with areas with high numbers of request markers.

What I learned

We learned a lot about React as a whole, and excited to start learning more in the future. We also discovered a lot of useful design philosophies and testing practices we will implement into future code to get our testing time much lower.

What's next for Hearth

Our goal is to get larger organizations involved that could promote this platform to help with the awareness of homelessness during COVID, and as a whole. This can help with bringing users closer with their community and feeling a strong connection with the people around them.