ShelterFinder

Keeping those without a home sheltered and safe by offering them a way to find an open homeless shelter that wont turn them away.

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Inspiration

Toronto has a major homeless epidemic that leaves countless people on the streets with no where to go.

What it does

Allows a user, whether through a phone or at a public computer, to find a homeless shelter near them that has an open bed for them to sleep in for the night.

How I built it

Our team built this with a major focus on JavaScript with a little HTML5 and CSS in Visual Studio Code. We also utilized various libraries inside the Google JavaScript Maps API

Challenges I ran into

We have never worked with a Google API and it was a challenge to learn how to intermix our code with the API

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Finding the distance from the users location to the shelter that they clicked on and retrieving the amount of time it would take to walk there. Working with the Google API and getting it to work in the ways we wanted it to!

What I learned

API's are challenging to work with but offer a great advantage in coding complex tasks. In our case, the Google Maps JavaScript API helped with visualizing and gathering location and geodata to find shelters nearby.

What's next for ShelterFinder

Adding an admin feature that would allow different shelters to register with us and actually retrieve real data on how many beds are available. We would also like to add a reservation feature that would allow the user to enter their full name and reserve a spot at a shelter for a set amount of time. This would allow the user to guarantee a spot at that specific shelter while they make their way over.

We would also like to discover more ways to make the application more accessible, so it may help as many less fortunate as it can.

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