Mutual Aid Site

Mutual aid sites, such as Duke Mutual Aid, are largely run on platforms that are hard to navigate, such as Facebook. This site allows mutual aids to display and manage requests and donations.

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Inspiration

As of recent, many Mutual Aid Organizations have appeared or have become extremely critical for people who are in need of funds who have lost their jobs or have become more disadvantaged after the outbreak of COVID-19. This site serves the purpose to allow users to request and donate money, while seeing real time status and having transparency within the mutual aid.

What it does

The site serves as an example for a Duke Mutual Aid site. It shows the total amount of money requested and donated. We also support material and housing requests, in addition to financial. These can all be seen within the Requests section, and more information will appear when a request is clicked on. Requesters can create their request using the embedded Google Form.

How We built it

We used React for the frontend and Node.js for the backend. The frontend is reliant on the backend for any data through API requests. For example, the requests data is pulled with Google API using a Google Sheets that is linked to the Requests Google Form. All of the request data is then written to Firebase, with IDs for each request. Login is implemented only for configured users in Firebase right now and is authenticated through Firebase from the frontend, and this will allow for future extension for identification and user accountability when fulfilling requests.

Challenges We ran into

It was difficult to use API documentation and had some formatting issues with React

Accomplishments that We're proud of

Got the frontend to take data from the Google Form and display it in a useful way.

What's next for Mutual Aid Site

Adding create account Backend also supports linking a user to a request ID, so when requests are made, a relationship can be made between the user and request in Firebase for later retrieval Allowing users to fulfill requests on the site, which will then call the backend toggle a fulfilled flag The backend already has endpoints to get the request a certain user created, so this can populate a profile page

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