Renew

In light of the war in Ukraine, millions of people have fled to neighboring countries. Our project, Renew, helps refugees in similar situations navigate life in an unfamiliar country.

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Inspiration 💡

In light of the war in Ukraine today, millions of people have fled to neighbouring countries into a frightening and uncertain future. Our team wanted to create something to help refugees in similar situations as they navigate life in a new, unfamiliar country.

What it does 🏡

Our project, Renew, is an app designed to provide support and resources for immigrants in a new country. The app name was chosen to represent the fact that we want to help refugees as they start a new life in a new country, hence renew. The app features a community function where users are grouped into communities based on where they came from and where they have immigrated to. Within these communities, users can post and comment about any questions or resources for users to learn from each other. Additionally, there is a map feature that filters for nearby food banks, hospitals, and areas with recent criminal activity.

How we built it 🌿

We used Figma to design UX/UI as a collaborative prototyping tool. React Native and Android Studio was used to develop the interactive interface with Redux for state management. For the back-end development, we used Node.js for the server-side platform with its app framework Express. Firebase was used for authentication and data storage (Cloud Firestore) as well as Google Maps places and geocoding API.

Challenges we ran into 🔥

The main challenges our team ran into were starting and setting up the React Native project and integrating the frontend with the backend. Working remotely was especially challenging as our team communication was more difficult and merge conflicts were definitely challenging!

Accomplishments that we're proud of ✔️

  • UI/UX: We chose a calming green/blue color scheme to emulate safety and rounded text in order to create a welcoming environment in our app for our users.
  • Frontend: We structured our frontend code and exercised good modularity using reusable components and TypeScript.

What's next for Renew 🔮

Our team hopes to implement the following features for Renew:

  • Language: View the entire app in your native language
  • Financing: Helpful resources to help you get started on managing your finances
  • Local laws & Rights: Resources to help you learn about local laws and rights
  • Culture: Upcoming events in your community
  • Job portal: View local entry-level job postings
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