About Nonprofit 💼

Access To Excess (ATE) is a nonprofit organization that rescues food and reduces food waste in the Dayton, Ohio region. They recover and redistribute surplus food from gardeners, farms, grocery stores, and local nonprofits to anyone in the community.

Project Objective 🌟

Access To Excess needed to transition from a restrictive Wix site to a modern, centralized platform that could handle seamless volunteer coordination and secure financial donations. Our team developed a custom, mobile-responsive web application that streamlines volunteer sign-ups, integrates secure Stripe payments, and utilizes Airtable as a "no-code" backend to ensure our non-technical Access To Excess client can easily manage their data and impact metrics.

Project Demo Video 🎥

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Link to Finished Project/Figma Prototype 🚀

https://github.com/AccessToExcess/access-to-excess

**Live Deployed Site! 🥗**

Process 💭

Our process began with a deep-dive consultation with the client to identify critical gaps in their existing infrastructure. We discovered that their workflow was heavily manual: donations relied on static QR codes for Venmo/PayPal, there was no centralized database for user information, and they lacked a mechanism to broadcast alerts to volunteers.

To address this, we adopted a four-phase approach:

  1. Discovery & Architecture: We mapped out a new site structure that prioritized user engagement, defining key pages for "About Us," "Donate" (Food/Money), "Volunteer," and dynamic sections for "Upcoming Events," "Impact Metrics," and "Blog Posts."
  2. Cost-Conscious Strategy: A major constraint was budget. We selected a tech stack that minimized recurring costs, choosing Airtable as a free/low-cost database solution that doubles as an intuitive CMS for the non-technical team.
  3. Design & Feedback: We created High-Fidelity wireframes in Figma to visualize the user journey. After presenting these to the client and receiving enthusiastic feedback, we moved to development.
  4. Iterative Development: We coded the solution using React (Vite) for the frontend and Python for backend logic. Throughout the build, we incorporated minor edit requests from the client to ensure the final product perfectly matched their vision.

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