Safe Space

An educational website to bring awareness to acts of violence minorities face and what you can do to help.

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Inspiration

We decided to start the project because we were all a part of minority groups, and wanted to do something to help with the issues we saw and faced on a daily basis. Especially with the recent resurgence in hate crimes against Asians and the persistence of systemic injustice against African Americans, it is clear that more resources need to be created in order to help people educate themselves on and minimize the harmful impacts of inadvertent discrimination. Once we started brainstorming ideas, we realized most of them revolved around the same common goal - informing people about what's going on in the world. We realized there are so many resources to read about what's going on - some a bit misleading, some not very easy to read, etc., so, we tried to make a shorter, easier-to-navigate tool to help our users learn more about what's going on and how they can help.

What it does

It's an informational website that serves to assist with minority activism. Our website was designed to do so by giving you information about terms you see misused in the media, providing ways for you to help these groups with petitions, a quiz about general knowledge of what's going on, and what you should do in situations involving these groups, and linking the acting groups' websites with a short summary of what they do. Our goal was to limit false information by informing people of what is actually going on.

How we built it

We made our website in repl.it by using tab dividers to separate the four main page sections. After this, we implemented a sticky tab for our three main headers (definitions, how to help, and learn more), so that no matter how you scrolled, it would be easy to redirect to another page. Additionally, we included a quiz on the landing page to test your knowledge after going through the three pages by using the form feature in HTML. Users were able to submit their answers to get their score, a short message, and if they got a perfect score on it, a hand-designed digital badge! Afterward, most of the work was just adding in all of our text and information, pictures, and a bunch of links.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into was trying to be too ambitious with it from the get-go. We had a bunch of ideas we went into coding with but had to scrap a few of them because of time constraints. This was a problem because it wasn't always agreed upon which parts to get rid of and which parts to prioritize.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of all of the progress we’ve made in organizing our hub of information, from its technical aspects to its potential societal impacts as well. In addition, we are also proud of our ability to condense and summarize a plethora of information into convenient and compact details.

What we learned

Throughout this entire process, we’ve learned more about the steps everyone can take to combat hate and discrimination - and we were able to convey that through the website. In addition, all of us learned more about web development and design, with our project requiring special elements from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

What's next for Safe Space

One add-on we wanted to implement was a "find an activism non-profit near you" feature where you could input a location (either zip code or address) and then a map would show you a pop-up of different organizations you could try to be a part of. We did start to try coding this but very quickly realized it would not be possible for our limited time constraint.

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