An Apps for Good (AFG) project with Jennifer Shaughnessy, Sumanth Sura, and Charles Tang.

The final project in the Mass Academy Computer Science course is Apps for Good. We are assigned to groups of 3-4 people, where we work together to develop an mobile application that can be used to support the lives of people. The problem our group focused on was digitzing the process of managing food pantries' inventories as well as streamlining the request process for clients to get in touch with pantries. To address this issue, our group developed a cross-platform web application called Pantry Access which is a universal food pantry application for both clients and pantry organizers. Learn more about this project at https://pantryaccess.web.app/ .

Food pantries often have trouble maintaining their inventories and organizing their food supply to deliver items to clients effectively. Furthermore, with a growing demand in food banks, there is a pressing need for software that can connect food pantries and clients.

The target audience of the proposed application are food bank volunteers, food bank management, and potential clients and donors.

We built a cross-platform cloud-based application that improves the organization of food pantries and communication between clients and food banks.

The three core features of this application are (in order of precedence): (1) Collect and manage the inventory of food banks into a database that tracks current inventory, quantities, and locations of the foods; (2) allow clients to access and view the inventories of food banks through a user-friendly interface; (3) create unique profiles for clients, food banks, or donors to foster stronger client-food-bank or donor-food-bank relations.

To allow this application to be cross-platform, we utilized Firebase's Firestore and hosting cloud services. Our sorting algorithms for managing food pantry inventories are provided with the Material-UI (MUI) Component Library.