Lilypad

Inspiration

Our Question:

How can we use tech to support and expand existing infrastructure (campus orgs like Bruin Dine, Swipe Out Hunger, food banks, soup kitchens, etc) to better serve the queer community and other marginalized groups?

Food security is a prevalent issue across the United States, and even more so for the LGBTQIA+ community. At the same time, consumers also generate a lot of food waste and excess every day. Instead of addressing these two issues individually, and inspired by UCLA's Bruin Dine, we hope to create a website to distribute the extra food that UCLA's dining halls, local restaurants, and catered events produce to those that need it.

What Lilypad is

Lilypad is a website focused on redirecting excess food around UCLA to those who need it, including vendors such as:

Dining Halls (Epicuria, De Neve, BruinPlate)
Local Restaurants (situated around Westwood)
Farmer's Markets/Local Farmers

Expanding off of Bruin Dine's operations with dining halls, members of Lilypad would be able to post their own listings. For example, big events with catering, local bake sales, and farmer's markets often have extra food after the event ends. And while all of these listings are primarily meant to give away free food, local farmers could also sell their produce on the site.

Main Features

Each listing includes the date, time, location, approx. number of servings, and food restriction tags (vegan, vegetarian, contains nuts, etc.)
Users that have signed up and passed a vetting process can log in and post a listing
The chat feature can connect and create a community between distributors and recipients
A search bar for specific locations and food restriction tags

How we built it & Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built Lilypad in Visual Studios using Node.js and the back-end with Firebase Our Process:

First we had to set up our homepage, including a header, a custom logo, and tiles with introductory information.
Then we implemented buttons and added multiple pages to our site
Finally, we tried implementing the search bar. The accomplishment(s) we are most proud of is getting each part of our website to work component by component.

Challenges we ran into

As the first (official) hackathon for all of our members, we met several difficulties in developing a website.

Github

With limited experience with using Github, downloading, linking, pushing, and pulling our code on Github was a struggle when trying to work on the same project together. Most of the beginning of our hacking was trying to set up Github correctly and linking an app to a repository. Learning how to commit and push our changes in the code was also difficult during the coding process;

Node.js

Figuring out how to code certain components, such as the search bar and how to flip a card, were all new challenges to our team members.

What we learned

With Github being what we struggled with the most, it's also one of the most important things we learned through this experience. Being able to link a repository, commit edits, and push edits are all skills we learned during this hackathon that will help us collaborate on code on future projects. Furthermore, building a website step by step also allowed us to learn more about web development, html, and css.

What's next for Lilypad

While Lilypad is UCLA specific as of now, we could possibly expand to other universities and communities within LA. We would strive to take advantage of existing resources and partnering with the local community to help those in need.