HarvestReach

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Inspiration

Book Harvest’s mission stood out to us because access to books is one of the simplest ways to change a child’s future. We’ve seen how consistent exposure to reading builds confidence, curiosity, and long-term academic success. On a personal level, I’ve also been involved with an orphanage, and that experience reinforced how important it is to build systems that reliably get educational resources into children’s hands — especially when resources are limited and every delivery matters.

What it does

HarvestReach is a Smart Book Selection System for Book Harvest’s Books on Break program. It helps partner schools and organizations:

Enter student counts by grade level in one place
Automatically match age-appropriate books using grade-level tags
Calculate exact quantities needed per title
Generate a clear order summary and packing list ready for fulfillment

As optional enhancements, it can also support constraint-based selection (e.g., fiction/nonfiction balance, diverse representation) and inventory-aware substitutions.

How we built it

We designed HarvestReach around Book Harvest’s real workflow and built a centralized web-based experience with two main user paths:

Partner (School/Summer) flow: account → student counts by grade → auto-generated selections → order summary
Admin flow: manage catalog → review orders → inventory checks → packing list generation

Under the hood, we structured the book catalog with grade tags and built matching logic to select appropriate titles and compute quantities based on enrollment counts. We focused on producing outputs that are immediately usable for operations (packing lists, exportable summaries).

Challenges we ran into

Translating a manual process into clear rules that still preserve quality and appropriateness
Handling edge cases like uneven grade sizes, substitutions, and bundling constraints
Designing outputs that are “warehouse-friendly” (not just a nice UI)
Balancing scope: building something demo-ready while still showing a scalable long-term vision

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A clean end-to-end workflow that replaces spreadsheets with a single platform
Automated matching + quantity calculation that reduces manual work significantly
Packing/fulfillment summaries that are easy to understand and operationally useful
A solution that keeps quality in mind (constraints + inventory awareness) rather than just “automation”

What we learned

We learned that scaling a mission often depends on scaling operations. Even a high-impact nonprofit can be limited by time-consuming, fragmented workflows. We also learned how important it is to design software that serves real users — staff, schools, and logistics teams — not just a technical demo.

What's next for HarvestReach

Next, we want to expand HarvestReach into a fully integrated platform that supports:

Digital agreements and streamlined onboarding
Invoice generation and payment tracking
Inventory forecasting and seasonal demand planning
An impact dashboard for donors and partners (students served, books distributed, geographic reach)
Optional community partnerships like a “Literacy Ambassador” network to support distribution as the program grows