Refugee Resource Hub

Inspiration

Refugees represent a sub-segment of Canadian society that typically require great financial assistance, with the average family income of a 2-year refugee family falling below $75,000. In Canada, several government & private bursaries and grants exist to support refugees- for families with dependent children, post-secondary students and entrepreneurs. However, the process to find and apply to each is confusing, time consuming and repetitive, with well over 20 separate databases. We wanted to create a user-friendly application that breaks down the barriers to finding financial assistance for asylum-seekers by consolidating all sources of potential funding onto a single platform called Refugee Resource Hub.

What it does

Refugee Resource Hub matches users to grants and bursaries that they are eligible for, by drawing from a database of most Canadian grants and bursaries, from sources such as “The Refugee Centre”and “Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada” Users input information about themselves such as their age, ethnicity and number of years resided in Canada, and the website queues application that they are best eligible for. It displays basic information about the funding source, and directs users to the application sites.

How I built it

We built the back-end framework on Express node.js, and the front end using HTML. The web application was hosted on Microsoft Azure and a prototype interface was developed using proto.io.

Challenges I ran into

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It almost works- for first-timers, this is a big deal!

What I learned

It was our first time using the Express framework on node.js and deploying a web application on Microsoft Azure. With limited JavaScript experience, we found the front and back end integration tedious. However, many video tutorials helped with this.

What's next for tohacks2019

Once Refugee Resource Hub has been beta-tested with over 50 users, we would love to add an application reviewer component to Refugee Resource Hub, that gives users the ability to score the quality of their application against prior winning ones. We would like to enhance the translation capabilities of the application as well.

Built With

• javascript-css-html-node.js-azure