Lend-A-Hand

Inspiration

After the incredibly devastating snow storm that impacted thousands of communities across Texas last week, we saw many families lose power, water, and heat. Many people relied on their local community gathering together and offering support and information on how best to overcome their individual circumstances. We wanted to streamline this process of exchanging resources by providing a centralized place for people to reach out to provide and receive assistance when necessary.

What it does

Lend-A-Hand is a platform that allows individuals who have been affected by natural disasters to leverage their community by exchanging commodities with each other. Lend-A-Hand works by allowing individuals to create an account on the platform and curate two lists: items that they are in need of and items that they have. By doing so, community members are able to not only obtain resources that they may need during the recovery process, but also help others in need by offering what they have in excess.

How we built it

We used React to create the frontend and utilized CockroachDB and ExpressJS for the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into include populating the table with the necessary items from the database and allowing the user to input their desired item and have the table dynamically change. In addition, we also wanted to allow users to remove any inputs if they want to. Furthermore, connection to the database was not feasible within the frontend UI, so we had to create an ExpressJS server to handle API requests from the user to our CockroachDB

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The website is easy to navigate through and has a minimalistic UI. Furthermore, we were able to leverage tools such as CockroachDB and ExpressJS and effectively incorporate them into our app. In addition, this web app is a culmination of an efficient way for community members to support those around them and also gain the aid they need.

What we learned

By creating this web app, we learned that there are many ways to help the community around us, especially during times of crisis. We also learned about the importance of creating clean, easy to use interfaces to simplify the app for its users. In addition, some members of the team were able to learn about the intricacies of a database.

What's next for Lend-A-Hand

Future features that we could implement could include sorting available lenders by nearest location, which would have been done through a simple geocoding service. In addition, we could turn this web app into a multi-purpose platform that could also be used for directly messaging and creating group chats with those in your community. In the future, we also hope to implement features that allow users to interact with one another to further specify items that they may need to expedite the recovery process. For example, we could utilize geolocation to find necessary services such as plumbing by incorporating community recommendations to help people find the best plumbers near them.