Inspiration
Our inspiration was definitely Black Wings Hacks itself. Firstly the theme of the hackathon, "Social Good" got us to think about how we could help the community around us, and also the notion of supporting Black Lives was important to all the members. This led to the idea of KinConnect; feeling comfortable in times of need, feeling understood, and easily connecting to people who are of similar background.
What it does
KinConnect is a platform that connects people of color who are looking for some professional in the medical, legal, or educational field to willing professionals in the mentioned fields. The purpose of the platform is for people to be able to work with other people who they would be more comfortable around and feel understood. The website offers profiles of the professionals who sign up to be on it, and KinConnect offers a connect option to those who would like to start a conversation.
Our Philosophy
At KinConnect we strive to improve the quality of life of black people. In order to do so, we decided to tackle two important problems which are the discrimination present within the fields of healthcare, education, and law and the lack of oportunities of employment given to people of color (POC). Therefore, people of their own race will feel more comfortable to open up about common struggles that POC suffer with another black person than somebody who does suffer from this issues. Through our website POC can contact black professionals who are therapists, tutors, or lawyers and become their client. Consequently, the listed black people's career will be benefited through exposure and more experience. These three professions were chosen since they all requiere a deep level of empathy, understanding and confidency bilaterally from the client to the professional.
Why is it helpful?
Finding black professionals is difficult due to the discrimination they are victims to in these spaces. Particularly, "In 2015, 86 percent of psychologists in the U.S. workforce were white, 5 percent were Asian, 5 percent were Hispanic, 4 percent were black/African-American and 1 percent were multiracial or from other racial/ethnic groups" (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015).
Moreover, according to a study made by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020), "there is a persistent racial gap. The employed share of prime-age Black workers stood at 75.7 percent from November 2018 to October 2019, while it averaged 80.8 percent for white workers in this age group".
Other alarming data is that "Among college graduates, for example, the Black unemployment rate averaged 2.8 percent from November 2018 to October 2019, 40 percent higher than the 2 percent rate for white college graduates in the same period" (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020)
So, by providing a space where black professionals are listed, it would be a easier way for other POC to contact them. This will also lead to exposure of the professionals to other prospects, which will boost their careers.
Our Values
Our values include diversity, inclusion, integration, and kindness.
How we built it
We first did wireframing to see what our website might look like, using Adobe Illustrator. Once everyone was happy with the outcome of the design, we created a GitHub repository for our project. and each member cloned the project from there. From that point, everyone focused on their own parts of the website while communicating through discord for any questions that came up during the process. To build our website, we used HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap.
Each members' part
Silvana: I coded the home page and the join us page. I also joined all of the code of the team for it to be structured the same way. Amilka: I was in charge of the professional's profile. Beyza: I coded the Professionals listing page. Also, in illustrator I did the wireframes of the home and professionals page. Ishwarya: I programmed the About Us page of our website.
Challenges we ran into
Our teammates were from two different time zones and this made it more difficult to arrange common times to meet and discuss our plans and tasks. Besides, using new technologies such as Bootstrap.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of having been able to work together on the project and put something out despite the time differences, and schedule conflicts.
What we learned
We have definitely improved our existing technical skills by deploying them, and also learned new ways of building things from each other. For example, one team member suggested doing wireframes, which others hadn't used before, and another member contributed with bootstrap knowledge, and how that is used.
What's next for KinConnect
KinConnect at the moment is a frontend project that needs to be further improved to support member accounts for both professionals willing to offer their skills, and for consumers/clients looking for professionals. It should also be able to support initial communication between the two sides with a chat feature. Other features such as max client/consumer for each professional could be tracked to show their availability in a certain period of time.
Reference
U.S. Census Bureau. (2015). American Community Survey 1-Year PUMS file. Retrieved from www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/pums.html. "Other" racial/ethnic groups included American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and people of two or more races. U.S. doctorate holders included individuals in the workforce with a doctoral/professional degree in any field. Total may not sum to 100 percent due to rounding.
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