Impact Compass

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Impact Compass

Inspiration

Rescue and community teams must often act from scattered updates: a foster deadline, medication need, missing transport, and donor offer. A summary is not enough; teams need a safe, accountable next action.

What it does

Impact Compass turns messy updates into an approval-gated care loop: Need → Urgency → Resource → Proposed Action → Outcome. It extracts the situation, proposes one clear next move, requires human approval before any commitment, and saves approved actions and outcomes as evidence for the next case.

How we built it

Impact Compass runs on AWS Lambda behind Amazon API Gateway with its container in Amazon ECR. CockroachDB is the production memory layer: immutable operational records and control-cycle receipts preserve state, and CockroachDB Distributed Vector Indexing retrieves semantically similar prior cases. We used the ccloud CLI to verify the backing CockroachDB Cloud environment.

Challenges

The hard part was making the agent useful without making it unsafe. The system can never contact a volunteer, spend money, or promise care without a person approving the proposal.

What we learned

Memory matters when it changes the next decision. Linking the original signal, approved action, and outcome gives care teams accountable context instead of another dashboard.

What's next

Connect real rescue and community teams to existing intake channels and resource networks while preserving human approval for consequential actions.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• cockroachdb