VolunteerLink

Inspiration

• We believe local action is key to global change.
• Many people want to help their communities but don’t know where to start.
• Volunteer opportunities are often scattered and hard to find.
• We wanted to build a tool that empowers individuals to uplift their communities and, together, help save the world, one service event at a time.

What it does

• VolunteerLink is a web app that connects students with nearby service opportunities and allows them to:
• Browse upcoming volunteer events filtered by category and location.
• Sign up for events and track hours.
• View a personalized dashboard with event history and total impact.
• Log hours manually and export service data for school verification.
• Receive notifications for new opportunities and events they’ve registered for.

How we built it

We built VolunteerLink using:

• Astro for dynamic page rendering and clean component structure.
• TailwindCSS for a responsive, modern UI.
• Express.js +nodejs for handling backend authentication and APIs.
• MongoDB to store user data, events, and service logs.

Challenges we ran into

• Setting up conditional rendering for the dynamic dashboard in Astro.
• Properly utilizing a combination of Express and Astro by rolling our own adapter
• Managing authentication state cleanly across pages while maintaing security in our database

- Designing a database schema that could handle both user data and nested event registrations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We built a full-stack volunteer tracking platform with usable login, registration, dashboards, and notifications
• The responsive UI is clean, functional, and modern.
• We implemented custom server-side logic without relying on existing adapters, working for our personal usecase.
• We created a scalable architecture that can grow with future features.

What we learned

• How to combine Astro with Express effectively.
• How to manage user sessions and render components conditionally based on login state.
• The importance of balancing frontend polish with backend reliability, and ability to simultaneously build out features

What's next for VolunteerLink

• Add real-time event updates and reminders.
• Integrate Google Calendar sync for signed-up events.
• Build a recommendation system to suggest events based on past activity.

Built With

• astro
• bun
• express.js
• google-maps
• mongodb
• node.js