BLOT (Basic needs for Ladies Over Time)

Combatting issues like period poverty through raising awareness of resources geared towards improving the lives of low-income and homeless women.

Comment 1

Inspiration

Being homeless is difficult — and can be especially dangerous when you are female-presenting.

Homeless and low-income women are the most susceptible to what is called "period poverty"; this term is defined by the UN as the "struggle many low-income women and girls face while trying to afford menstrual products." We thought it would be helpful, not just to those who need products, but also to those who wish to donate anything that could be helpful to those who could make use of women's shelters.

What it does

This web app locates and lists the information surrounding women's shelters across the country, providing the phone number, address, name, and approximate location on the U.S. map. It also has a section solely for education.

How we built it

We used Figma for the design, and typical HTML/CSS/JS was used with react.

Challenges we ran into

Neither of us was very familiar with "front-end oriented languages," and it had been a while since either of us had touched HTML and CSS. We struggled to get the project off the ground and found ourselves struggling quite heavily for the first few hours of the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are quite proud of the idea, first and foremost -- it's something we believe we can build on even after the hackathon, both as a service to our community as well as a way to build our coding skills. The design of the website is clean, and the color palette is easy on the eyes.

What we learned

This hackathon gave us a better idea of the difficulties surrounding deadlines, what it's like working with full-stack frameworks, and the need for realistic expectations. Considering neither of us was very comfortable with the framework needed for this project, it would have served us better to seek help earlier to not waste time. Also, initially, we were planning to combine Python and React, before realizing React alone was more than enough for our purpose.

What's next for BLOT (Basic needs for Ladies Over Time)

  • Integrate Google Maps
  • More resources outside of shelters
  • Possibly initiate delivery of affordable menstrual products to academic institutions

Built With

Share this project:

Updates