myCharitable

A service that connects restaurants with in need individuals to facilitate food donations.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this project came from seeing people in need all around Atlanta, and thinking about what we could do to make our communities better. We believe that businesses want to do outreach and we want to make it easier.

What it does

myCharitable allows users, verified to be "in need" by entering their EBT number, to have accounts on the web app. Restaurants can offer donations through myCharitable- whether that be from excess food or simply because they want to donate. The user will receive a text notification when a new item is added to the available food items. The user then comes to the restaurant and receives the food using their myCharitable card. myCharitable then tracks the amount that the business has donated, and the business is able to write off those donations on their taxes each year.

How we built it

For this application, we used MongoDB as our backend system, Java SpringBoot to handle server logic, and React to build our mobile friendly web application. The full stack is hosted on a virtual machine on Azure. We used the NCR Silver API to create a mock implementation of the myCharitable process by querying the Silver API to have real time inventory information. In this system, the NCR Silver POS system is used for the actual transactions, however the web application allows users to view inventory before arriving at the transaction site. We implemented Twilio into our server logic in order to alert users by text message when new donation inventory is input.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges that we faced throughout the development process was parsing data of different formats on our backend server. Keeping data synchronized between the NCR Silver API backend and our own MongoDB backend system was challenging as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team was very cohesive and was able to work together well. Because each of us has a different knowledge set, we were able to get a lot done. We are particularly proud of the user interface.

What's next for myCharitable

We are excited about the potential that myCharitable has, especially because there isn't a lot of infrastructure that isn't already in place that would be needed to implement this idea, and it could improve a lot of people's lives. We would also like to add a "Charity View", where charitable organizations could pick up bulk orders to disperse donations to individuals who don't have items like EBT verification, a way to access the internet, or transportation.

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