Oakhacks: Grassroots

Our group created Grassroots, a website that supports grassroots movements and campaigns. Our mission is to support grassroots movements and learning or growth by allowing users to create workshops to raise money for local initiatives. These workshops are open to the public to register and attend in exchange for a donation. How it works is users and hosts create a profile on the website users scroll through the Discover button and look for new events. Users can register for the event of their choice, then donate and once it's processed they'll get an email with a zoom link. Technicals implemented include Flask and SQLAlchemy for database to create the REST API with Python and the front end includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a fetch API for the HTTP get and post request. In terms of real world application due to Covid, numerous organizations and grassroots movements have had a harder time getting donations. With food banks and other vital organizations being of greater need, there is a large demand for fundraising. Some people lack money but have time or skills that are valuable to others.

In terms of research, there are lots of statistics that show that organizations have experienced a larger reduction in revenue and had to decrease or reduce their operations. There are additional stats that also show that the impacts of COVID have even caused disruption that has caused them to close down or even to experience a larger decrease in revenue and a really big impact. Now onto our demo. When you go to our website you'll be directed to a sign up page where you can fill in the form, include your email password password and then click the sign up sheet. Once this is completed they can go to the Discover page and they can also look for different events that they can register for. When they click the register button they will be redirected to put their information and then they'll get the email the zoom link.

Also, youth can use this to generate donations for local causes and again grassroots organizations can leverage their group members skills and unique assets to generate additional fundraising. Current platforms are saturated and difficult to gain traction with due to saturation. It's difficult to have trust with organizations like GoFundMe and other platforms. Since money goes directly to the host, our system plans to automatically donate the funds directly to the non profit organization or grassroots organization.

There's more information about the target demographic here and in terms of research, again, charities have faced billions of dollars in lost revenue and disruption. Thus plus it's really important for Grassroots to be implemented. This is an example of some prototypes that were created with some additional graphics that would have been implemented if we had more time with the browse Events section and also just more customization with the background. Also, if you press the events section, we are going to add a platform here where you can donate yourself and then you can also see a description and this is what the Join now button would look like with the color scheme and and also potentially this could fit into a business model if we charged commission, included affiliate links, or had ads on the website. Thanks for listening.