Vuzz

Vuzz is tinder for volunteering. Each year, only 25% of Americans volunteer. Vuzz matches volunteers with organizations, helping organizations match with eager volunteers in a convenient and easy way.

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## Inspiration Our inspiration for Vuzz stemmed from a desire to create a user-friendly platform that brings volunteers together and enhances the experience of discovering and participating in volunteering events. We aimed to make the process more engaging, interactive, and enjoyable by incorporating gamification elements. This innovative approach encourages greater public engagement and simplifies the search for meaningful activities. The name Vuzz is derived from Volunteer Huzz, reflecting our mission to foster a vibrant and connected community of volunteers by finding the “Huzz”.

What it does

Vuzz is a dynamic platform designed to connect volunteers with meaningful opportunities in an engaging and interactive way. Through a swipe-based interface, users can effortlessly browse and select volunteering events that align with their interests.

How we built it

We used React-Native for our mobile app development and used a firestore database for the backend to hold our information and queries.

Challenges we ran into

Messages was slightly laggy mainly because firestore wouldn’t easily allow chat messages to work that well so it worked sometime. Location services were difficult to implement as well. It was hard to find an API for our purposes, and even when we did, it often caused conflicts with existing support in the profile and events screens.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Within the three of us we had almost no frontend experience nor any prior backend knowledge. Despite our lack of experience, we were able to create a really amazing mobile app in 36 hours which really shows our skills in learning new technologies quickly and being able to adapt in a relatively short time.

What we learned

This was our first hackathon, so coming into TreeHacks, learning was our number one goal, and one that we feel we have successfully achieved. Firstly, we learned about impact. We knew that we wanted to make something that would make the world a better place, so we looked in the best place we knew - around us. Only 4% of college graduates (over the age of 25) volunteer each year before age 35. As college students, we are starting to experience the constant hustle that tends to leave the genuine fulfilment that comes from opportunities like volunteering behind. Thus, we wanted to make volunteering more accessible on both ends. We also learned about frontend, as none of us had ever built an app before. It was a long process learning react-native, but one we thoroughly enjoyed and are looking forward to taking forward in our development careers.

What's next for Vuzz

We imagine the future of Vuzz to be volunteering at scale. We are hoping to partner with as many volunteer organizations as possible - ones you’ve heard of, and perhaps more importantly, ones that you haven’t. We also plan to expand into the student body, and college communities across the country as a starting point. From there, the sky is the limit!

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