Bridge centers around providing access and support.
Bridge strives to tackle the disadvantages many people face in our current society from gender and racial bias, sexual violence assistance, to a mapping system of free menstrual products. We spoke with a diverse set of women to create something that goes far beyond a weekend hackathon. Bridge creates community, provides access, and makes a difference.
Bridge is making it easier for women and the LGBTQIA+ community by offering guidance in healthcare management, career advancement, and fostering a community of accomplished and intelligent women
Bridge takes data from publically available data sets and focuses its insights on gender disparities while providing tools and resources like career training and single-parent aid to lift our community up.
➡️Our Search Function: We have created a platform that is unique in its focus on helping women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community search for companies that understand the importance of equal pay, workplace resources and training tools. Perhaps more importantly, avoid workplaces where women coworkers progress in promotions more slowly and earn significantly less than their male counterparts in the same position. We realize this gap is multifaceted and contains many biases, so we added additional resources and mentor groups to build a community ready to fight for more.
➡️Our Mapping Function
We leveraged the Google Maps API to provide access to resources like-:
🩸 free menstrual products
🚽 gender-neutral bathrooms
👩⚕️ sexual reproductive health facilities to help women and refugees
🤖 chatbot to help find more assistance if needed, and a space to donate menstrual products if you are able.
💸 We have also included a page to know about gender pay gap in big tech companies.
➡️Our Resources Bridge is a functional resource hub for everything our interviewed users needed in addition to the potential needs of refugees. We have pages full of information from Career Advice, Salary Negotiation, Diverse Community Building, Aid for Mothers, Helplines for Sexual and Domestic Violence, Pro-Bono Immigration Services, Abortion Aid, and much more.
We want to accelerate women's career paths, give women access to essential information and training, increase the ease of access to health information for Women and Refugees alike, and aid in reducing bias through trainings and diverse community building.
We are so proud of the way this feature will function for our community and the real help it can bring.
➡️Our Fundraising/Donations We realize that information isn't enough for some and that fundraising will be necessary to fund some of our larger initiatives. We added a merch site to our page where 100% of proceeds go towards assisting refugee women and girls and their reproductive healthcare.
We also added an area that connects to a database where people can donate menstrual products. They can commit to providing 5 boxes of tampons and their donation will go to our database.
Bridge Backend
Website: Bridge
Code: BridgeCode
➡️ HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap and Canva
➡️ Google Maps API for fetching the location of gender-neutral restrooms and menstrual supplies
➡️ Python to parse .csv files and Google Maps API to show the locations.
➡️ Chatbot for urgent help and to connect with the team
We wanted to properly simulate a professional work environment so we started with a deep understanding of the problem with proper user interviews and stories that led to feature creation and prioritization of those features. After prioritization, we separated the workload into small chunks with a focus on what we thought would have the greatest impact on the community.
We then created an agile approach to creation that involved many MVPs (minimal viable product) where we would constantly test the validity of our approach through small iterative builds that we could then continue until the creation you have now.
We had big dreams for this project. There were so many things we wanted to add and so much we had to do to ensure each feature was also highly usable. With so many features we had to do a lot of coordinating and quick turnarounds. Communication and clear deliverables were key, especially with our large timezone difference.
Learning new areas of development and completely new languages and frameworks that we now feel we could confidently continue creating for our own projects. We did so much over this weekend and we are so proud of what we created and the impact it will have on the community.
Having a big idea of changing the world can feel so overwhelming at the onset, but breaking the problem up into chunks and then tackling each and every one while stopping for group learning opportunities created a great environment for learning and a great product.
We also learned that there have been so many people before us trying to do great work. By collaborating with our local support organizations, we were able to really elevate what our technology could achieve.
We would like to continue growing the data set we built the foundation for and also continue the work on our learning platform by creating some of our own content and providing interviews with leaders in the field. We would like to create an app and collaborate with more members in the community to provide larger data sets of information ensuring that every city, state, and country can have full access to these resources.