House of Hope

Home page
Shelter Provider Information Sheet
Map of shelter requests

Inspiration

A big part of disaster recovery and relief is making sure everyone has shelter, especially in cases such as earthquakes where there may be additional problems following the main disaster. When brainstorming for this project, we thought about how disasters themselves can rarely be prevented, but recovering from them afterwards can be faster and more efficient.

What it does

Our website allows people to register as either people in need of shelter or people who can provide shelter. In cases of emergency, House of Hope helps connect them in order to make sure most people, if not everyone, have a place to stay overnight until better aid can be provided. To help with locating and finding people, our website also connects to local police departments to track where everyone is and ensure that people are accounted for, as well as to conduct background checks.

How we built it

We first created a demo version in Canva using the hyperlinks to plan our website and course of action. This was also used to design our front-end, which was then integrated into our back-end, coded using html.

Challenges we ran into

In coding the back-end, we ran into a lot of bugs and issues, so quite a bit of time was dedicated to fixing them. Overall, we didn't have any major issues and planned our time well enough that and problems were mitigated fairly quickly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of our planning and coordination as it allowed for efficient time management. We also ended up having enough time to take breaks throughout the two days, so we did not drain ourselves too quickly.

What we learned

We learned more about what is defined as public safety, which includes disaster relief.

What's next for House of Hope

We plan to add more security to our website, so that for example someone random can't sign in to the police account, as well as connecting our website to a real police department.