Community Service -Helping Hands

An multifunctional application to help volunteers during the pandemic

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Inspiration

Through the pandemic, many teens struggle to find volunteering opportunities that impact their community. Connecting with like minded individuals is still difficult and staying organized is a struggle. Helping Hands is here to, well, help! Through Helping Hands, volunteers can connect to event organizers, find opportunities, and connect with other volunteers. It is a multi-functional tools for volunteers and potential organizations to help their community through service and stay safe. Find out more about Helping Hands below!

What it does

Our website is full of helpful info on keeping safe and on volunteering, Our Volunteer Hour Log and Calendar help volunteers stay organized and keep track of events, and Volunteer Event Managers are able to request to put their events, so volunteers can find them. We also have a map with common volunteering locations like libraries and senior citizen centers.

Volunteers can make an account or login then use their personal dashboard to stay organized. On this dashboard, volunteers can find their volunteering numbers, upcoming opportunities, and declare their interests. There is also a calendar to stay organized. Then, the volunteer can look at different pages for more information about safety, create a volunteering event, or even chat with others through the public forum!

How we built it

We built the back-end using phpMyAdmin and MySQL. We made the website through HTML/CSS/JS and used Bootstrap for organization. All vector images are from Stories by Freepik

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were time constraint and some problems with the integration. We wanted to make a leadership board for those who were volunteering and so we could incentive the efforts but, we faced problems with our database and could not complete the program within the time limit. We also faced some problems integrating the database but we were able to troubleshoot and integrate completely.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the ability to integrate the database and website and the user friendly design. We wanted a multi-functional tool so that the website could be accessible and useful for all and we were able to accomplish most of the features we wanted. The integration took us time but it allowed us to have a website that remained updated and helpful. It was our first time working with a database and integration so it was a really good experience.

What we learned

Anchal learned how to make a database and integration using PHP and MySQL. She also learned how to make multiple HTML/CSS features such as scrollers and more. Aanya learned how code using CSS and how to code a calendar using HTML. Both of us learned how to make a user friendly design.

What's next for Helping Hands

We hope to expand our forum and have volunteer opportunities from all over the country. We also would like to implement a leader-board based on the volunteers with the most hours. We didn’t have time to execute the idea. This would promote more service during the pandemic. We would also like to highlight safety in a virtual setting through an informative page.

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