Neighbourly

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Inspiration

Over the past few years, the UK has seen a noticeable rise in far-right rhetoric, social division, and increasingly overt racism—both online and in everyday life. Communities that once felt connected now often feel fragmented, with people becoming more isolated from those who live right next door.

We wanted to create something practical, positive, and human—something that reminds people that what unites us locally is stronger than what divides us nationally.

What it does + how it works

Neighbourly Exchange is a Vite + React application that helps neighbors share skills, track favor balances, coordinate requests, and meet up at community events. The app integrates with Supabase for auth, data storage, and real‑time functionality.

Challenges we ran into

We definitely ran into our fair share of challenges during the hackathon. None of us had a ton of technical experience, so a lot of the tools and frameworks were completely new. We spent way more time than expected debugging basic setup issues, merging code that kept breaking, and trying to figure out how to turn our ideas into something that actually worked. But honestly, that was part of the fun — we learned everything on the fly, made it up as we went, and somehow still pulled a project together by the end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Even with all the challenges and our lack of technical experience, we’re genuinely proud of how we pulled together as a team. We figured things out step by step, helped each other when we got stuck, and actually ended up building something real and working. It felt great to see the idea go from “no clue what we’re doing” to an actual functioning project.

What we learned

We learned a lot throughout the hackathon — not just the technical stuff, but how to work together under pressure. We picked up new tools, got better at debugging, and figured out how to divide tasks so everyone could contribute. But the biggest thing we learned was that you don’t need to be an expert to build something meaningful; you just need to start, experiment, and keep pushing through the challenges.

Future improvements

For future features, we’d love to build a full mobile version of the platform so people can use it on the go. We also want to add an embedded messaging system inside the app, so neighbours can communicate, plan gigs, and organise community events without having to rely on external apps.