SUSSI: Volunteering Made Easy

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Inspiration

People love volunteering. It’s a great way to go to the outdoors, meet people in your neighborhood, and improve your community. At the same time, there are a lot of people who need volunteers: local leaders spearheading a new environmental initiative , students building nonprofits to help their community, or an impassioned citizen just trying to clean up the parks for a weekend. However, despite this strong supply of volunteers, and this strong need for them, linking up volunteers with initiatives is extremely difficult. While social media avenues, like Facebook or Twitter, can be used to post your weekend trash pick up, they are simply too busy. Their platforms are too generalized and have more content on cats than finding opportunities for volunteering. So thus, we asked ourselves, how do we fix this problem? How do we support sustainability groups–picking up garbage and planting new trees–-all while making it easier for citizens to find these initiatives and give a hand. Well this weekend, we built a Service Uniting Students for Sustainability Initiatives. Introducing, SUSSI: Volunteering Made Easy.

What it does

SUSSI is an online platform connecting sustainability events, like trash collection and tree planting, with volunteers seeking to improve their community. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for people with an afternoon free to find an avenue to help their community. On SUSSI, volunteers can see an event, their location, time, and purpose, allowing for swift decision making. On the other hand, passionate organizers can easily create events for volunteers to see, allowing them to increase initiative participation, and thereby community engagement. Some common events could be trash collections in densely populated areas, lending a hand in a food drive, or helping plant trees in a local park. Aside from just linking people together, SUSSI also handles all the logistics of organizing. One of the biggest draws for volunteers is having regonzinced volunteering hours. However, for an organizer, keeping track of hours and having them issued is a logistical nightmare. SUSSI does volunteering hours, and issuing, all automatically. SUSSI also gamifies volunteering, introducing a community leaderboard inspiring other people to help the community. Overall, SUSSI is building strong relationships in local communities, simplifying the search for volunteering, and, most importantly, fostering an environment of sustainability throughout a community.

How we built it

The front-end website was built in React.JS and the backend server is powered by Django. Using the REST framework, client devices communicate to our servers, transacting information through our Postgres database. All pages were made with love by us.

Challenges we ran into

Building a fully functioning website has not been an easy journey. Even though we started smoothly, we first encountered issues when integrating back-end with front-end. Some features we wanted to include were not possible to implement in such a short time such as a fully functioning calendar displaying all events taking place and google-map level location-area searching. Something all of us will certainly take into consideration next time is to more strictly follow a set-up plan. As we became more and more excited about the project, functionality issues started piling on top of us. We often would tackle one feature or bug, but then switch to another midway through. For example, we didn't realize that the profile page was not working until 5 hours from submission time. Near the end however, we started planning out what we need to do and focusing on fully completing features. Lastly, it was extremely difficult for us to find an adequate brand identity for the project. Even though we eventually managed to put all key features into place, it wasn’t until the last day of the hackathon that we finally got a color scheme together and a common style sheet integrated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are all proud of how well we formed te am chemistry and a very supportive environment. We did not know each other prior to meeting in the welcoming seminar room, yet we spent the last 48 hours cracking jokes, listening to music, and sharing stories about our lives. We are also proud of ~~surviving~~ competing in the fire noodles competition. Even though three of us nearly died, Kevin managed to win a water bottle by sucking on the noodles in 10 seconds for which we are all very proud of him. We even managed to go out of our comfort zone by taking part in karaoke and singing Tay Tay songs into the night.

From a more project aspect, we are proud of the branding scheme we came up with, and how well the color mesh together. We hope that by creating a friendly brand identity, we streamline the user experience and increase connections between volunteers and organizers.

What we learned

This hackathon was a first for many reasons. Three out of four teammates have never been to a hackathon, making it both an exciting and nerve racking experience for the team. We did not know what we were going into, but despite our hesitations, we had an amazing time. Likewise, we each tried to push our boundaries as programmers and thinkers, picking up new tech stacks (Django, React) and isolating core issues in our community. In fact, ¼ of our team came into this hackathon with little to zero programming experience. Despite this, Tom learned how to use OpenCV for creating our volunteer hour certificate, and picked up a bit of React, designing our landing, about, and profile pages.

What's next for S.U.S.S.I.

We believe SUSSI is a viable product that could be implemented for practical use in communities across the US and globally. Our website presents itself as a minimum viable product upon which further improvements can be made from initial user inputs and opinions. We hope that we will have the opportunity to collaborate further on building such a platform which significantly contributes to sustainability and mitigating climate change worldwide.