Support Ottawa

Our mission is to connect homeless individuals to shelters, resources, and the community. We ensure fair shelter & food distribution, match donors to needs, and empower volunteers to help effectively.

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Support Ottawa

Inspiration

This project was inspired by an interaction a group member had with a woman in need at the bus stop.

From that we discovered that a huge problem in the community of homeless people and people in need is disconnection, whether its between people supporting help, services providing assistance or with each other.

Thus we decided to build this platform to form a connected community even for those in need!

What it does

  1. Smart Shelter and Food Bank Distribution – Our platform maps homeless individuals to available shelter spaces, ensuring fair distribution and reducing overcrowding.

  2. Real-Time Shelter Updates – Shelter managers can update availability and status in real-time, making sure no bed goes unused.

  3. Community Engagement & Assistance – We empower kind-hearted individuals to announce charitable acts, such as meal distributions, clothing drives, or free services.

  4. Partnerships with Local Organizations – We collaborate with food banks, shelters, and outreach programs to enhance support and ensure sustainable aid.

  5. Donations – Directs donors to the nearest and most in need shelter for the certain donation being made

How we built it

Design Figma

Front-end Gadget, Google Maps API

Back-end Google Maps API, Gemini API, Gadget

Challenges we ran into

  • Working with the Google Maps API: When working with Gadget and React the complexity and unfamiliarity made it hard to integrate the API

  • Enabling smart distribution: Finding a way to develop the best decision trying to balance proximity, even-distribution and availability

  • Designing an interface that was easy to use for all users, including homeless individuals with limited tech experience, meant simplifying the UI while maintaining functionality.

  • Time Constraint There being a 36 hours and only two of us made it very hard to make a complete fully functional web application

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Finishing a fairly complete application Considering the amount of time we had we are very proud of the results of our application

  • Having a fully fleshed solution that is in our opinion pretty thought out and well fleshed

  • Being first time users of Gadget and used APIS we are proud that we were able to implement all the APIs and use gadget successfully

  • Our persistance: During this experience we went through many big hurdles but we still continued to persist and push through

What we learned

  • Finishing implementing our webpage to take our application to the next step

  • How to use Gadget, which is a very useful tool to build full stacks

  • Integrating APIs into React, which will definately be helpful for future projects

  • How to build a solution under a lot of pressure,

What's next for Support Ottawa

  • Building relationships with organizations to get the most out of our application

  • Further refining our AI mapping model to make sure we are always giving the most accurate suggestions

  • Implementing Kiosks over the city for easy access to those in need

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