Houston Volunteer Central

Inspiration

Each year our school hosts a competitive programming contest, and we ask for volunteers from our school's volunteer organization, but many of these volunteers choose not to show up or eat the food provided and leave. Many other nonprofits in the Houston area also face this problem, and we would like to fix that.

What it does

Houston Volunteer Central is a matchmaking website for finding volunteer events near you, allowing volunteers and organizers to rate the quality of the other's service.

How we built it

We built it using a loosely coupled frontend and backend that talk through a REST API. Our backend was built using Django, and our frontend was built using React and Bootstrap.

Challenges we ran into

The majority of our development team was unfamiliar with the frameworks they were utilizing, so most of us had to learn how to use them in the course of about a week.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that we feel that we have a fairly complete prototype that looks very clean and professional

What we learned

We learned that our school problem of getting good volunteers for our contests are actually widespread throughout Houston and we wanted to find a solution to fix this throughout the city of Houston.