Kunnus

Inspiration

I'm the Executive Director of a 501(c)(3) non-profit myself, and so I do understand how hard it really is to get grants, especially as an educator. There are very few grantmaking organizations / opportunities and most are almost always competitive, making it hard for educators to get funding.

As students, we're directly impacted by this, because if there's a lack of funding, we suffer the hardest on the front of quality education.

That's why I decided to build Kunnus (derived from the Finnish language), a platform which is a implementation of a grant database. Except - it's free, and doesn't have as many overhead costs as traditional full-stack applications.

What it does

Kunnus is a grant database platform for educators - it allows you to find & track your grant applications in one integrated platform, enhancing your ability to stay on track with your goals.

It directly fits within the theme of helping educators (especially those who may lack certain resources) because it's free, convenient, and just a click away. Contrary to many popular beliefs, grants are often barred by a paid subscription. Kunnus is 100% free.

Note: The landing page + grants page have mock/placeholder data utilizing Next.js Routing. However, this is a implementation that can be further scaled if connected to an actual database.

How we built it

I built it with Next.js v15 + React (TypeScript) using Visual Studio Code!

Challenges we ran into

• There were multiple dependency-related issues. When starting the project, I used TailwindCSS v3. However, I really wanted to try TailwindCSS v4. This was not a good choice - I spent about five hours attempting to debug a lot of issues, especially because v4 has a lot of breaking changes (incl. PostCSS). Eventually, I downgraded to v3. Maybe next time, folks.
• The drag and drop did not work for the kanban board. I spent an hour or two trying to fix it until I eventually decided to use a fork of the library which is newer. I got it to work!
• A lot of build errors.

Accomplishments that i'm proud of

• Started a project on the afternoon of March 21, shipped a partially working website on the evening of March 21
• Got the website to be 100% functional on the afternoon of March 22 (<24hr)
• Made the project efficient (using localStorage instead of a traditional database)

What we learned

• If it works don't fix it
• Always, ALWAYS read release notes to make sure that you're not going to break your entire project

Built With

• next.js