Inspiration
Volunteering is incredibly important and we wanted to create something that would foster that importance and motivate the masses to take part in something good. We were inspired by the lack of visually appealing volunteering job boards. We wanted volunteering to be an experience that people really want to do and seek doing, and the goal was to create something that not only benefits good samaritans but also benefits the organizations who provide the positions as well.
What it does
RootedGood is a volunteer job board that connects people who want to make a difference with organizations that need their help. Volunteers can browse and filter open positions by location, urgency, difficulty, duration, and required skills. They can save positions they are interested in, apply directly through the platform, and track the status of all their applications from a personal dashboard. Once an organization confirms a volunteer has completed a position, RootedGood generates a resume-ready text block with all the details of the volunteering experience so volunteers can easily add it to their resume. Organizations get their own dashboard where they can post new volunteer positions, manage their listings, view everyone who has applied, and confirm volunteers upon completion. They can also attach a donation link to their posting so supporters who cannot volunteer can still contribute to the cause.
How we built it
After brainstorming we got to action! We had 3 members develop the back end of RootedGood and 2 members working on the front end. We used Java to write the backend and we used fire base for our data storage system. The front end is written in TypeScript, HTML, and CSS.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into the challenge of connecting the backend to the front end which took quite a lot of time to resolve. We also experienced the challenge of figuring our how to write the endpoints of the website into our fire base system. Additionally, we struggled to get everyone's backend to work in the beginning because everyone's computer required different commands to make it work. Our website may not be as technologically advanced as others, but we wanted to value community and change through whatever we created.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
In all honesty, we are really proud of ourselves for entering and perservering through this hackathon. It is all of our first time participating in something like this
What we learned
We learned that communication is imperative for creating a product that all team members are proud of. Also, that it is okay to make mistakes because that is just another form of learning. We also learned how to apply our skills from our computer science classes to this hackathon which felt very rewarding.
What's next for RootedGood
The future of RootedGood holds exciting features such as matching volunteers to opportunities' based on their interests, as well as a mobile app version to create more accessibility.
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