Voluntinder

Inspiration

Communities rely on their members to support each other. Finding ways to volunteer your skills for a verified organization can be difficult, and finding skilled volunteers can be tedious. We wanted to create a platform where skilled volunteers can connect with registered charities that would benefit from their skillset.

What it does

The platform allows volunteers to sign up and browse positions, and for charities to sign up and create postings for positions. Candidates can apply to positions that interest them and cater to their skills. After that, the charity can decide which volunteers they would like to contact for their organization.

How we built it

For the front end we utilized the react.js framework with react router for page navigation. Evergreen UI was used for adding styled components with further customization in CSS. For backend we used express to set up our runtime environment for Javascript. We used cockroachDB since that was the most scalable SQL database out there. We made our own hash function to encrypt passwords and set up our own authentication route.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some trouble setting up our cockroachDB tables. It took a few hours to get this resolved to be able to continue with our project. As a result, we felt like we were racing against the clock for a bit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that our product has the potential to directly and indirectly improve the lives of many people. We're proud of our progress on the frontend and backend with authentication and database.

What we learned

We learned a lot about backend development. None of us had used cockroachDB before. We got better at making SQL queries as a result. We learned how effectively code collaboratively in a virtual environment.

What's next for Voluntinder

We want to incorporate some more features to make Voluntinder more appealing to charities and volunteers. We want to include some sort of verification where charities can verify how many hours a volunteer has worked, and so volunteers can have evidence of how much time they have volunteered. This addition would be useful for say highschool students who need a number of hours, or for candidates who want to include their volunteer experience in professional settings. We also want to potentially incorporate in-app messaging potentially for charities and volunteers to be able to communicate through our platform.

Built With

• cockroachdb
• evergreen-ui
• express.js
• node.js
• react.js