Helper Helper

Helper Helper empowers volunteers to connect directly with essential workers in their area or remotely to help meet their needs during the COVID-19 crisis.

Comment

Inspiration

Helper helper is a prototype created for the Girls in Tech virtual hackathon in response to the COVID-19 crisis. It's purpose is to alleviate the burden on essential workers by matching them with volunteers/donors who respond to their specific requests. The motivation for creating this direct connection is two-fold:

  1. Many essential workers don't qualify for economic/non-profit support during this time, and are increasingly at risk of burn-out and health related concerns due to the nature of their work.

  2. Many non-essential workers are trying to find ways to volunteer and contribute during the COVID-19 crisis, but most volunteer organizations are not accepting volunteers. Additionally, many people are concerned about where their money goes when they contribute to non-profits and this allows them to contribute directly towards specific needs for essential workers.

What it does

The application works by allowing essential workers to submit requests through the "Make a Request" page. After their essential worker status is confirmed, their request will appear on the "Help a Helper" page where volunteers can respond to the request via a message that will go to the essential worker's email address.

How I built it

Helper Helper was developed as prototype using React as the front-end framework with a "mock" server to display fictional requests. It would be further developed by connecting with a back-end server that stores requests as well as user information so that essential workers would not have to re-authenticate with each request.

Challenges I ran into

One of the difficulties faced with this application is preventing spam as well as making sure that individuals are "who they say they are". If this project is to be developed beyond a prototype and scale up, it will be necessary to have a means of verifying identity as well as using a spam filter such as reCaptcha.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm really proud of the styling on the forms for both the "Post a Request" and the "Message a Helper" pages. I'd never worked with the Formik library before so it felt like an accomplishment to alter the styling to fit the overall theme of the website.

What I learned

I really learned the importance of being able to integrate a back-end into customized web projects. I've had experience with connecting front-end apps with existing APIs, but this project inspired me to start learning Java so that I can write my own APIs.

What's next for Helper Helper

In order to scale up this project, several components would have to be added:

  1. The user should be able to sort volunteer requests by location or select only remote jobs
  2. Verification processes would need to have some level of automation
  3. A back-end would need to be built out to manage requests and user information

Built With

Share this project:

Updates