Charity Track

How can food bank donors and clients be better connected?

Second Harvest Food Bank distributes food through a network of nonprofit partners at over 900 donation sites nation-wide. Based on their research, Second Harvest has seen that many food-insecure people in Silicon Valley work multiple jobs and struggle to make it to food banks during business hours. Additionally, since many calls for food donations are as broad as "imperishable" or "canned goods," grocery options for food bank clients are limited. Likewise, food donors don't know what items are not aware of what items are most in demand. 

The Solution 

Charity Track connects food bank donors and clients with an easy-to-use app. Clients use the app to indicate which foods they'd like to pick up from the food bank, information which the app shares with donors, who can see what foods are in demand then donate accordingly. The students partnered with Second Harvest Food Bank to learn user needs and gain a better understanding of the food bank service chain. 

Demo of Charity Track

Operating as two apps as one, Charity Track's backend server was developed on Cloud Firebase, a mobile and web app development platform, which also acts as the main database. Charity Track uses iOS paltform services such as location services to direct users to their nearest food bank, identified by the Second Harvest Food Bank network.