NYC Food Banks

We noticed that there are few websites that compile all the information of food banks in a city, specifically NYC for our project. Our group made NYC Food Banks to solve this issue.

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Inspiration

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City struggled with a hunger crisis. According to City Harvest, the pre-COVID figures show that 2.5 million working-age New Yorkers were struggling to make ends meet. Nearly 1.2 million New Yorkers were experiencing food insecurity (defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a “lack of constant access to enough food for an active, healthy life”). During the current pandemic, the situation is even more dire: Over 1.5 million New Yorkers are struggling to feed themselves and their families (38% increase from pre-COVID statistics). One in four children are experiencing food insecurity (49% increase from pre-COVID statistics).

Right now, it is even more important to support local food banks. Our team recognized that finding information about different food banks (including their hours of operation, location, and requested items) can be difficult. Therefore, we made this website where people can easily search for food banks that match their criteria, making it easier for them to access and support food banks.

What it does

Our website has three main sections (About, Find Local Food Banks, Donate/Volunteer) that provide users with information and options to get involved with their local food bank. We have an interactive map that shows the concentration of food banks per zip code in New York City. We also have a form that allows users to search for food banks based on zip code. After inputting their zip code, the table below will show the name, address and telephone number for all food banks in the zip code.

How we built it

Using Repl to collaborate, we used a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Python.

For our interactive map, we initially web scraped info from an existing website with food bank information using BeautifulSoup4. We then cleaned up the information using Pandas. Finally, utilizing the cleaned data and Folium library, we built the interactive map that displays the concentration of food banks per zip code.

For our search by zip code feature, we converted our cleansed data into a CSV file with Pandas. Then we used JavaScript to implement the search and display portions.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few challenges along the way. It was difficult to understand the way the website we scraped data from was organized, but after looking at it in detail, we figured out the pattern and were able to extract data.

We also ran into a few challenges for the search by zip code tool. We had difficulty connecting the different parts of the tool, specifically the backend and frontend. Initially, our JavaScript portion wasn't able to access/find the inputted zip code.

As we add different portions of the code, we had to adjust the layout and format of our website in HTML and CSS to accommodate the features and still be visually appealing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how everything came together! In building this project, we all stepped out of our comfort zones and tried something new. None of us had previous experience with web scraping or working with data to be displayed on a website according to some criteria. More specifically, we’re proud of the website design, interactive map, and search by zip code features on our website.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web scraping and working with both backend and frontend features of a website. It was interesting to see how those two aspects can be combined together to create a well-working website

What's next for NYC Food Banks

We are hoping to implement the donate and volunteer sections to allow people to connect directly with and contribute to their desired food banks from this website.

For our search by zip code feature, we would like to implement an address field so users can find the food banks closest to them. We also want to improve the depth and breadth of our web scraping, so people can see more information about their food banks and so the most updated information will be on our website.

We would also like to implement this for other cities so that more people would be able to benefit.

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