Pomoshch

5-minute volunteering that makes a difference 🌱

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Inspiration

I'm a 14-year-old youth policy advisor and Executive Director of TLEEM, Texas's largest K-12 networking nonprofit helping over 4,000 K-12 and college student members build social capital. Being in the nonprofit industry myself for years, I have seen firsthand the importance of volunteering and how critical they are to nonprofits. However, many organizations face a lack of volunteers, which hinders them in helping serve their target population(s) and achieve their mission. Many of the tasks that these volunteers are assigned are also easy to complete and self-paced.

However, I noticed the lack of microvolunteering platforms, which gave me the idea of Pomoshch. Pomoshch is ΠΏΠΎΠΌΠΎΡ‰ΡŒ in Russian, which means help. The idea of Pomoshch has the potential to directly impact individuals from various walks of lives through the tasks they complete. Not to mention, Pomoshch can also scale beyond traditional volunteering and further serve as a platform where people help people.

What it does

Pomoshch is a microvolunteering platform that connects people with simple volunteering tasks that take under fifteen minutes to complete (the ideal task takes about five minutes to complete!). Tasks vary, such as helping Timmy understand the mathematical concept of multiplication, sending kind-hearted letters to seniors, or volunteering and helping nonprofit organizations further work towards their missions.

How I built it

I built Pomoshch using Next.js, React TypeScript, and TailwindCSS!

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to complete the backend portion of Pomoshch, due to time constraints and having to go to bed. However, I was able to build the frontend and serve mock data to show a prototype or demo of the site in action. Pomoshch can be further developed to have a working backend via integration with Firebase or Supabase.

Access the site here: https://pomoshch.vercel.app

Challenges I ran into

  • Next.js v15, particularly their new async params API. Was quite a bit of a learning curve amongst their new breaking changes, but managed to fix it.
  • TailwindCSS. This was like playing a game of whack-a-mole, because TailwindCSS would often fail to load correctly for the slightest issues (e.g typos in the layout). The worst part is that there's no true Tailwind debugging tools to find out what went wrong, so you need to experiment around.

Accomplishments that i'm proud of

  • I started and finished the project in about two hours, right near the deadline (two hours before the deadline, which is 1AM in my time). I originally started my project a few hours before this, but felt that it had too many features, which diluted from the core purpose of the platform. As a result, I rebuilt the entire project from scratch (ouch!) to optimize and align with the features we truly need.
  • I was able to establish a sitewide light/dark mode system appearance! Additionally, I was able to add other features such as commenting, task completion, and more, using dynamic routing.

What I learned

  • Always stay true to your project's core purpose. Don't add too many features.

What's next for Pomoshch

Adding backend support (through Firebase/Supabase, likely Supabase) would definitely be one! I'd also add more core functionality (such as organizational signups so that nonprofits can post their own tasks for which they need assistance).

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