Helping Handouts by HackHeroines

Main landing page
Donations listing page
Volunteer opportunities page
"Food" Donations in the "95131" area page
See details of a donation listing page
See details of a volunteer event page
Profile page

Inspiration

Inspired by the theme of social good, our team decided to explore a way to solve social and community issues together. We created Helping Handouts to help organized donors and donees connect to empower businesses and organizations to make sustainable choices when faced with excess material goods. When companies create too many of one item or make a mistake on an item, categorizing it as unmarketable, these material goods often end up in the wastelands. Although donating these items feels easy to do,. There are many barriers to entry for organizations when they want to donate excess goods. 92 million tonnes of textile waste are produced every year (Earth Organization). Additionally, the world wastes about 2.5 billion tons of food every year, and the United States discards more food than any other country in the world: nearly 60 million tons—120 billion pounds—every year (Recycle Track Systems). With all of this waste going to our environment, we thought of a better way for local businesses and large corporations to recycle and reuse! Additionally, to help local communities support one another, we weaved in the ability to volunteer or post volunteering opportunities for anyone in the Helping Hands community. We decided to incorporate this idea because of the recently coined term "loneliness epidemic" (https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf). This epidemic is partly, yet largely, due to the lack of community that's built into most people's day-to-day lives, which decreases levels of serotonin and purpose in one's life. However, a study finished in 2014 shows that volunteering contributes to our happiness levels and increases mental stability over a long period of time (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-020-00242-8). To help businesses generate less waste, build a culture of quality use, and create community over meaningful projects, Helpful Handouts aims to build a kinder world. Check it out here: https://spiffy-nasturtium-4e1527.netlify.app/

What it does

Helpful Handouts is an online marketplace where donors can list donations and donees can request to take the listings based on local zip code. Volunteers can choose which events or tasks to volunteer for in their local community and can also list a volunteering event. In our demo, we showcase the ability to click on a donation listing and a volunteering event. Additionally, we show the search results given when a search ( "Food") and zip code are given. Video To Demo: https://vimeo.com/909752056?share=copy#t=0 Video To Prototype: https://vimeo.com/909691901?share=copy

How we built it

We started with a hi-fidelity mockup in Figma (done by Monica Lee) and coded the front and backend in the languages listed below (done by Harika Bale, Cassie Shumeng Guo, and Mabel Furutsuki).

Challenges we ran into

Starting off, it was difficult to be on the same page on the vision of the idea because we didn't have a clear mock up. However, once we started to have a mock-up we were able to see the vision much more clearly. We struggled with being able to consolidate what features different user roles would be able to view and also to consolidate the demands of the fields for the search and the listings that would appear. However, after we discussed the user experience, we were all on the same page.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of being able to make a working prototype of the full website (in figma) and a clear, working version of the website which can be hosted locally (in git). Although we weren't able to code everything in time. We're happy to have been able to showcase what Helpful Handouts full capabilities were imagined to be.

What we learned

We all learned different ways to work with one another, especially with three of our group members learning to navigate Figma in the moment and one group member getting very familiar with Figma. Additionally, we learned that having a communicative development team and design team are really important when it comes to creating products that are easy to use and navigate in our daily lives.

What's next for Helping Handouts by HackHeroines

We're hoping to develop even more features including building out a REST API, real time matching of donors and recipients as well as volunteering opportunities and chat to make it all run smoothly and start deploying it for use locally in the San Jose area to help the local businesses and community.