GrantHive

Make the complicated process of determining eligibility for grants easy with GrantHive!

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Inspiration

We were drawn to the idea of creating a project around the current housing crisis, which is a multifaceted issue caused by a multitude of factors, such as a lack of affordable housing, rising housing costs, and stagnant wages. We wanted our project to provide information that could relieve those directly affected without complicating the project. Our draw on government funding related to housing came about because we knew that government grants were a great way to alleviate financial burdens, but the process to determine eligibility for them is often confusing and complicated, and people may not even be aware of what these grants are and that they qualify for them; GrantHive seeks to simplify this process by determining grant eligibility through a simple questionnaire that collects demographic information that the users would have at the top of their heads.

What it does

GrantHive is a website that consists of a survey (asking demographical questions such as age, income, size of household, occupation, etc.) that, once filled out, provides an individual with a list of grants that are applicable to them. In this, it also provides the summary and direct links to the application site. The website centralizes the data on different Federal and State Grants, focusing on California, specifically San Jose. California is the state with the largest population and the focus on San Jose allowed for a close-up understanding of such an economically diverse area. Moreover, by focusing on San Jose we were able to use its medium income data of 2020 ($117,324) as the base line to determine what is considered a low-income, less than 50%, which in this case was $58,662 average medium income. The grants incorporated into the data base provided, focused its relief for individuals instead of companies that are focused on providing affordable housing.

How we built it

We built the front end using HTML and CSS for the form and button layouts as well as javascript (Node.js) to purpose the buttons. The form submissions and data retrieval functions were implemented with Firebase.

Challenges we ran into

When creating the survey questions, we found that we had to cut down on the questions we wanted to ask to be able to make the project functional in 24 hours; this required prioritizing the most important questions that mattered when determining grant eligibility, and cutting out those that may have been difficult to implement but couldn't have benefitted as many users as other questions. For example, we wanted to have a question around ethnicity to acknowledge the institutionalized oppression of past redlining, which would mean added grants that were specific toward relieving marginalized groups. However, as aforementioned, it would have made the survey too complicated to complete within the time limit. There was one more challenge we had, and that was that low-income was decided by a person's median yearly income compared to the median yearly income of those living in the same districts, which led us to focus our grants specifically toward San Jose Income data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of combining a diverse skill set to form a functional project; Our team spans across three majors (CS, Psychology, and Anthropology), and we ensured that everyone's ideas were heard and that we were all able to play a part in bringing this product together; knowledge was utilized from all disciplines and incorporated into GrantHive. Kavitha and Amanda used their CS knowledge to design the website, Sara used what she had learned from her Anthropology classes to help with the ideation of our project and give us information about the housing crisis, and Nell used what she had learned regarding ethical data collection from her Psychology classes to design our questionnaire.

Regarding technical accomplishments, the process of setting up a working database was challenging - we encountered a lot of issues with not being able to retrieve data we were passing in through the form. We're really proud that we were able to debug the code regarding the database and make that functional, as well as successfully connecting our front end and back end.

What we learned

In this process, everybody had a chance to teach others about an aspect they brought to the project. Kavitha and Amanda, who are computer science majors, were able to teach Sara and Nell about coding and the basis and intricacies of how it works. For example, Kavitha explained front-end development and which snippets of code corresponded to different parts of the website, as well as how CSS styling adds to the aesthetic of a webpage. At the same time, Amanda negotiated with Nell and Sara about creating a more simplistic survey by showing the process it would take to code the survey and databases. Nell, a psychology major, used her knowledge of creating ethical forms and gave insight on how to do so properly while demonstrating how to research for the specific data source. Sara, an anthropology major, built the project's ground idea and explained the housing crisis's intricacies, along with educating others on anthropology 'coding' using keywords to help narrow down the data collection. Overall, everybody could bring something to the table and walk away with new knowledge.

What's next for GrantHive

We bounced through many different ideas and came to the census by providing grant information was the best solution, however the many suggestions that were scrapped are items that we wish we would have implemented into the website. There were two major schools of thought. One is to further expand the database for grants related to the Housing Crisis so that the grants go beyond individual housing relief. This could include adding grants that apply to Nonprofits, development companies, and other groups into our database. We wanted to investigate the different aspects of the housing crisis and thought about adding grants that provide economic relief for individuals struggling with employment. Adding these to the database would also include updating and adding questions to the survey, such as a question about ethnicity. Additionally, the updated algorithm would have a better understanding of how to calculate a person's median yearly income to determine the level of low-income they are at, which can equate to how much they are eligible to get.

The second school of thought related to the future of the website and how it could also provide other essential pieces of information that related closer to those directly struggling with housing. Moreover, people who are currently facing homelessness, eviction, and more. One idea would be adding a map that locates affordable housing and developments targeted at affordability. This map would also have the option to indicate where food banks, hostiles, and other social services, such as the different food pantries are. And then lastly, the map would indicate regions showing where you can sleep in your car and where benches are. The final item we were interested in is providing an updated list of laws that an individual could use to their advantages that were housing related, such as Martin vs. Boise 9th circuit and the new SB9 that focuses on eliminating single-family regions.

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