A 2020 Year in Review

Taking a look back at our 6th and 7th semesters as an organization.

To our friends, alumni, and members of Hack4Impact UIUC,

It has been a while since we’ve had a moment to share all our growth! As our community has continued to expand with every semester, we have seen new faces, taken on new roles, and set out on a wide array of initiatives to continue to strengthen ourselves. We’d like to take this moment to share an overview of how we have developed over the Spring 2020 and Fall 2020 semesters. We’ve split this rundown into categories: products, community, external relationships, cross-chapter relations, and even a brief look into our vision for 2021.

We’re incredibly proud of our community for the immense amount of passion and thoughtfulness that they have demonstrated to our organization, especially even after the transition to remote mid Spring 2020. We’ve constantly been reflecting on ourselves to determine how we can best curate a tight-knit community, build high-quality products, and fulfill our mission. To all that are reading this reflection and keeping up with our organization — we hope that you enjoy reading the following updates and continue to accompany us on our journey to create software for social good!

Hack4Impact members showing off their miniature paintings after an All-Hands!

Product

• Updates on adopted products:

+ Kiva APR Calculation Tool: The product that David Chang & Megha Mallya’s team built in Spring 2018 is estimated to be 50% more time-efficient and used for upwards of ~1000–1250 loan products for 250 partners.

+ GlobalGiving Web Crawler & Nonprofit Classifier: Both tools created by Josh Burke + Aryn Harmon & Aria Malkani + Roy Chiu’s team have been incorporated into Atlas, their long-time nonprofit repository tool project that was recently released.

• We’ve worked with 8 nonprofits partners this year!

+ Spring 2020: GLEN World (education), Kids Save Ocean (sustainability), Life After Hate (justice advocacy), SaverLife (financial literacy), and YMCA New American Welcome Center (immigrant advocacy).

+ Fall 2020: 3DP4Me (health), Collective Liberty (anti-trafficking), GLEN World (education), and MENTEE (immigrant advocacy).

• Year-long projects & returning partners: YMCA NAWC and Life After Hate were our first year-long projects and we recently partnered with GLEN World for another two semesters. We’re very grateful to have the opportunity to work with partners who have big visions for our collaborations! It’s encouraging to see our partner relationships grow stronger:

+ GLEN World partners Dr. Sumit Singh and Professor Madhow have advocated for our services to 4 other nonprofits while encouraging UCSB to consider starting a chapter. Shoutout to our Spring leads Kelley + Rebecca and Fall leads Tiffany + Yousef for their hard work in fostering such a strong partnership.

+ YMCA NAWC partner Gloria Yen continues to be an advocate for Hack4Impact with increased confidence in leveraging technology including our Oasis product and Salesforce to use for their internal operations. We are excited to be part of their journey in this soon-to-be three-semester partnership.

+ 3DP4ME partner Jason Szolomayer has formed especially tight-knit relationships with our fall team. Whether it be sharing exciting news about their new Jordan office through video or asking a question on Facetime, Jason is clearly very passionate and empowers our team to contribute our best.

• More emphasis on user research: Not only have we been conducting more user research with our Spring 2020 projects, but we’ve also implemented user research calls as an additional stage in the initial Product Research (PR) product scoping timeline.
• Addition of a Tech Director: Undoubtedly, the largest upcoming shift in the structure of our organization lies in our newest Tech Director role. While there are a lot of possibilities that lie in store for this position, we expect that this will not only ensure an extra level of quality and standardization to our products but also allow us to continue developing and exploring our own technological capacities as an organization.

Community

• Diverse All-Hands experiences: Community remained one of our pillars this year, especially after the transition to remote back in March. All-Hands meetings continued to be a place where we inspired and learned from each other. We’ve had:

1. Spectrums: Personal discussions where members discuss their varying perspectives on topics including Facing Adversity & Education.
2. Team bonding: Events where we build team chemistry including Zoom Olympics and painting with kits we sent to members.
3. Lighting Talks: We learned about accessibility in tech from Tiffany, how to make delicious pizza from Jeffrey, and the beauty of chess from Yousef.
4. Guest speakers: Yuliya from Greylock shared her insights on the startup world and venture capital.

• Lean-ins: In the Fall, the Community Committee has hosted lean-ins as a place for members to speak about tips and reflections on topics such as good study habits and imposter syndrome.
• Mentorship program: We reinstated a mentor & mentee matching program for current members and alum. This fall we had a total of 17 pairings!
• Organization-wide bonding: We continued our tradition of hosting Meet4Teas where we assigned members random group pairings to provide everyone an opportunity to meet different members of the organization equally. Check out all the creative Zoom group photos in #uiuc-meetups!
• Alumni Visits: As most of our meetings have been virtual, our events have been more accessible to our alumni. We’ve been so excited to see familiar faces stopping by to visit! We hope to continue making the most of these remote semesters.

Showing some love after a Spectrum-themed All-Hands!

External

• Returning sponsors: A big thank you to Rima from Facebook for continuing to support us through our journey!
• New collaborations: In Spring 2020, we worked with the Champaign Public Library at their Teen Lounge to introduce middle schoolers to programming and hosted a Fireside Chat with 3 Cofolios Product Designers to critique our products. In Fall 2020, we partnered with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for our very first public-facing workshop to teach an introduction to web development.
• Member Spotlights: We’ve revived this series highlighting the insights, accomplishments, and challenges of our members. What was originally a series of articles on Medium has recently transitioned into Facebook and Instagram posts! Here’s a shoutout to our lovely alumni who have shown their love for the organization even past their undergraduate days.

Cross-Chapter Relations

• H4I National Board members: Our members Tiffany Duong and Neeraj Aggarwal have been working on Hack4Impact’s national board as the Co-Director of Design and Co-Director of Product respectively, and driving initiatives of their own!
• H4I National Bootcamp series: Two of our Tech Leads Jackie and Kendall helped host a chapter of the National Bootcamp series, teaching an introduction to React Hooks to an audience of 50+ students!
• Tech/Engineering Director discussions: We’ve been extremely appreciative of other chapters with Tech/Engineering Directors for being so willing to schedule meetings with representatives from our chapter, as well as for answering whatever inquiries we had regarding the position! We learned a lot of useful and inspirational information, and are thankful for the guidance.

Looking Forward

• Internal initiatives: This year, we’ve had a lot of changes within our organization. We’ve added a new Tech Director role, developed a user research stage within our Product Research timeline, and deepened our relationships with past partners, all in addition to the continuous effort to keep our organization tight-knit in these remote semesters. Moving forward, we’ll need to work together to define a lot of new roles, continue to improve on our new initiatives, and consistently pursue the changes that we wish to make in the organization.

Message From the Directors

With this new year marking the transition from Fall 2020 to Spring 2021, here is a short message from our incoming, continuing, and outgoing directors!

Tiffany (Incoming Co-Director): I am so incredibly grateful to be leading Hack4Impact UIUC into its eighth semester! Joining Hack4Impact has given me some of my most meaningful relationships, technical experiences, and opportunities in college, and I hope to continue this tradition for the rest of our members. Through Hack4Impact, I want our members to feel empowered to be socially-conscious and mission-driven throughout their college careers and beyond — making the impact of our organization grander than the effects we have on our nonprofit partners.

Yousef (Incoming Tech Director): Hack4Impact has quickly become my most cherished extracurricular involvement. Here, I’ve met and learned so much from some of the most amazing and driven students on campus. I’m looking forward to continuing exploring and pushing the boundaries of what it means to build tech for social good. Together, we’ll focus on building production-ready software even if it means a longer timeline, educate and provide more opportunities to learn and grow for our developers, and explore new avenues to further our projects + impact as tech continues to evolve.

Arpan, Sabelle, and Sue (Returning Directors — Co-Director, Community Director, and External Director, respectively): Although the Fall remote semester brought forth a completely unique set of challenges, it also proved to be an opportunity for a lot of growth within the organization. It taught us to reflect on our methods of community-building, capitalize on opportunities that were only made possible by the virtual setting, and even gave us space to be a bit experimental with the change in routine and re-question many of the norms we’ve established over the past few years. The Fall semester has granted us an even deeper understanding of the organization and its needs, and we can’t wait to hit the ground running in our Spring semester endeavors!

Annie (Outgoing Co-Director): With my Co-Director term wrapped up, I feel an immense sense of gratitude for all of Hack4Impact, particularly the people and experiences. My growth the past two years as a human and leader, I directly attribute to this org and each of you who have created this place that I genuinely love and want to put my time towards. I want to see each of you contribute, stay engaged, and speak up! Your voice matters, and we want to see you flourish. I am confident about the new generation of Hack4Impact UIUC — all of you — carrying the torch forward and can’t wait to see what new frontiers you all will tackle.

Thank you for reading! For more updates and stories like these, follow Hack4Impact UIUC on Facebook, Instagram and Github.