Homeless shelters are experiencing a shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as well as necessities such as food and hygiene products and are in dire need of donations as more and more people living on the streets look to them for resources during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bridge4Good is a website dedicated to connecting homeless shelters with the resources they need during COVID-19. Donations are collected through online purchases through our website, so donors are not risking exposure to COVID-19 when donating.
Shelters can register with our website and post detailing the exact items and quantities they need so users know exactly where their money goes.
Our platform also helps support local small businesses during these trying times. Local businesses can add web addresses to the shelters' posts indicating where the necessary products are sold online so that donors can purchase items remotely. Bridge4Good will help small businesses generate income during these trying times. We used Marvel to mock up our front-end design, scikit-learn for machine learning algorithms, and Flask to deploy the back-end functionality.
Using a logistic regression model, we took into account a donor’s location and donation amount in order to match donors to their best-fit shelter.
We are not integrating any personally identifiable information, only the first three digits of each donor's zipcode and the amount of money they wish to donate.
DevPost submission here: https://devpost.com/software/bridge4good/
Marvel UI demo here: https://marvelapp.com/4fbh673
Business Model Canvanizer here: https://next.canvanizer.com/canvas/rZwKGVW7rlHBA?utm_source=canvasview&utm_medium=link_page&utm_campaign=next
Presentation here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/118lKos88RL6xjwct2LViElZRllRiJ8YtjLm7DV-NCSY/edit?usp=sharing
Pitch here: https://youtu.be/ho4k64DFbbAWe ran into a few challenges because none of us had a lot of experience in AI or machine learning-- our mentors helped out in understanding how ML algorithms function and we learned a lot about how we can apply AI to real-world problems.Going forward we plan on further using machine learning to match shelters with a target group of donors based on demographic information along with an analysis of donors’ past activity to predict future donation patterns.
We also plan on expanding the platform to iOS and Android users and advertise the platform via search engines such as Google and through Instagram, Facebook, and other social media sites with platforms dedicated to social good such as @goodnews_movement and @tanksgoodnews.We need your help in promoting our campaign and in expanding our platform to include a smartphone app.
View this projects github page