Inspiration
In Boston alone, there are approximately 128,000 people that live under the poverty line. This is just under 20% of all Boston residents. Many people have lost their jobs due to the pandemic and struggle with affording basic necessities. During these hard times, we thought it would be a great idea to make an application to help those that are less fortunate than the rest of the population by having restaurants donate extra food or just donate food in general.
What it does
CharityGo enables users to find restaurants near them which donate food. At the end of the day, most restaurants usually just throw away their excess food. With CharityGo, the restaurants can donate the excess food which they do not need or may just want to be friendly and help people out by donating food. Using the google maps api, restaurants which are near the user and are donating food are found and are then reported to the user. The user can then choose which item they would like and order it from the website at no cost. The user will then get a confirmation text to ensure that no one else takes their spot. Now here is the twist. We know if we made this open to everyone people who can afford food would use the service too which would take away from the people who can not afford it. This is why we decided to ensure that the user really needs the food by having the user input their EBT number which will then determine if the user is eligible for the food or not. If the user is eligible, they can continue onto the application, however, if they are not eligible then they will not be able to place the order.
How we built it
For the front end we used pug. For the back end and server side we used node.js. For the confirmation text we used the twilio api. For the restaurant locator we used the google maps api. For the EBT authentication we used the SNAP State Directory.
Challenges we ran into
implementing the EBT authentication was a challenge to us as we had never worked with EBT numbers before.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The authentication and all the api calls work perfectly.
What we learned
How to use EBT authentication and the twilio api
What's next for CharityGo
We plan on making CharityGo a real application so that people can actually use this application and benefit from resources that would normally be wasted
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.