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Youth Matters: Philly

Code

Helping foster youth find resources in the local Philadelphia area (Fall 2016)

Technologies used: Flask (main Python web application framework), Handlebars (create JS templates for displaying resources), Google Maps API (mapping resources), Papaparse (parsing CSV files of resources)

About the Project

“Each year, approximately 800 youth age out of the child welfare system in Philadelphia without being placed with a family. These youth face significant challenges finding housing, employment, getting health care, making ends meet, and navigating the foster care system itself.”

Home page

Impact

The desired effect is to help increase the number of youth aging out of the child welfare system by using the app to locate necessary resources.


The Team

Fall 2016 Team members:

Rani Iyer
Project Manager
Annie Meng
Technical Lead
Ben Sandler
Brandon Obas
Kyle Rosenbluth
Sanjay Subramanian
Stephanie Shi

Features

  • View both a map and list of all the resources

  • Ability to search location and search resources by name

  • Ability to filter resources by multiple criteria

  • Ability to suggest new resources and edits to existing resources

  • Ability to rate/review resources

  • Admin-editable static pages to display important non-mappable information to youth

  • Mobile-responsive interface

  • Admin console to add, delete or edit resources

  • Admin ability to bulk upload resources through CSV

Technical Challenges

  • Allowing for bulk uploading of resources through CSV and accommodating potentially large files and flexibility in being able to handle both reseting all data as well as updating

  • Defining and then implementing ways for users to be able to do more detailed searches for resources by filtering