Uplift

An app for members of the community to connect with non-profit organizations, charities, and community events and service projects.

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Inspiration

There is a lot of good in the world, sometimes it's just hard to find it. Our app aims to connect people who want to have an impact with the organizations that have the means but not the manpower to do so.

What it does

Uplift allows members of the community to view organizations and events to find ones that match their mission, and lets them RSVP for service opportunities. It tracks upcoming events and keeps track of what users have volunteered for, making community involvement much more accessible.

How we built it

We used Next.js as our framework to build our application using react, written in TypeScript. It was a lot of trial and error as we got used to the features and tried to get our website to look how we wanted it to. Luckily, we formed a pretty good sense of direction for the site that was able to help us shape it into what we imagined.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first ever hackathon, and we were only a team of two, using tools we had 0 prior experience in. It was a pretty steep learning curve that slowed us down a lot at first, so we weren't able to do as much as we had hoped, but overall we were happy with the result.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While our project won't be as technically advanced or intricate as others, for our first attempt at making a real-world application we feel that we made a lot of progress in the right direction. We got over the hump of getting started and were able to create a decent looking website that we can continue to build upon.

What we learned

Preparation and planning is everything. Before the hackathon, we would have benefitted greatly if we had figured out what tools we wanted to use, had them ready to go, and had a general idea of where we wanted to go with our project.

What's next for Uplift

We want to continue developing the application to turn it into something we can actually deploy and use. This means fine tuning our design and features, getting a good backend up, adding user authentication, and integrating different ways to view the app depending on if it is a citizen or an organization using it. We also want to experiment with making it a feasible mobile app, so it can be more easily available to a wider number of users.

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