2017 Year in Review
Hack4Impact is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to building technology for social good.
Dear friends of Hack4Impact,
2017 was a big year for us. We’re excited to share a snapshot of our work, progress, and continued goals. Thanks to all of you for your support, advice, and generosity this year.
Numbers at a glance:
- We’ve expanded Hack4Impact to 7 university campuses across the country.
- We have 80 student members, each of whom is actively building software for nonprofits.
- This year, we completed 15 unique software projects for nonprofits including: ACLU, Habitat for Humanity of Philadelphia, Next Generation Scholars, Rebuilding Together Atlanta, and more.
- Our flask-base repo received 1,200 stars and was trending as one of the most popular open source projects on Github. It has been forked 172 times.
- Our blog posts on developing technology for nonprofits have been shared on FreeCodeCamp.com, garnering more than 45,000 views.
- We’ve formalized a National Hack4Impact leadership team, led by 6 Hack4Impact Penn alumni.
Hack4Impact Expansion
This year, alumni of Hack4Impact from Penn spearheaded a chapter program, aiming to bring Hack4Impact to universities across the country.
As the year comes to a close, we are thrilled to share that we have six incubating Hack4Impact chapters — at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Tech, UC Santa Cruz, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, and Columbia University. Working with these schools has been a great learning experience for all of us, and we’re excited to watch them continue to grow and thrive.
Quotes from our new chapters:
We are excited to ramp up for our second semester as a chapter and see the organization grow. We are equally excited to see the successes and progression of other chapters!
- Alvin Wu & Varun Munjeti, Co-Directors at Hack4Impact UIUC
We love it so far! Testing out the waters, so many people want to be a part of the club. The group dynamic is on point, with everyone trying to help when they can and taking initiative. And it’s a fun, positive environment. Definitely appreciate being a part of it.
- Glory Jain and CJ Bennett, Co-Directors at Hack4Impact UMich
We’re lucky to have become good friends within a short period of time. Starting a new chapter hasn’t been easy but we’ve been lucky to have received consistent and meaningful support from National and other Hack4Impact Chapters, whether that be through weekly check-ins or simple moral support from a H4I Penn member. The support we’ve received has shown us Hack4Impact’s strong sense of community across all chapters, and that makes us even happier to be a part of the family.
- Supriya Khandekar, Xonatia Lee, & Vivek Subramaniam, Co-Directors at Hack4Impact Columbia
Interested in starting a chapter? Get in touch! We’re getting ready to launch our next round of recruitment for new chapters. If you are considering applying, indicate your interest here, and a member of Hack4Impact will reach out with more information. The application to join the Spring 2018 cohort of Hack4Impact chapter leaders can be found here and is due by Friday, January 5 at 11:59pm PT.
Project Spotlights
ACLU
There are many court dockets in PDF format on the US Department of Justice website, presenting a potentially valuable source of data from which to extrapolate trends. That’s where the Docket Analyzer comes in. This project scrapes the US DoJ website and extrapolates data from several court documents so trends and correlations between various characteristics can be drawn (e.g., neighborhood income vs. crime rate, etc). This tool will be used at ACLU to help their employees and volunteers understand patterns in the justice system and direct resources accordingly.
- Stephanie Shi (Product Manager) & Riley Wong (Tech Lead), at Hack4Impact Penn
Neighborhood News Bureau
This semester, we are working with a nonprofit called the Neighborhood News Bureau (NNB) based in Tampa Bay, Florida. Their mission is to empower the community and youth with education both in journalism and African American history & culture. NNB is currently curating a database of cultural stories and key local events that are not captured in history textbooks. The goal of this project is to design an educational tool that allows students to visualize the data on a story map/timeline based application so they can explore and learn about all this lost history. The social impact of the project is the preservation of African American history and education for the new generation.
- Alvin Wu & Varun Munjeti, Co-Directors at Hack4Impact UIUC
We completed 15 total projects, partnering with the following organizations: Next Generation Scholars, Community Legal Services, Clean Air Council, Habitat for Humanity, Madaktari Africa, Code2College, Drawchange, Enchanted Closet, Midtown Assistance Center, World Water Relief, Atlanta Audubon, & Rebuilding Together Atlanta.
Stay tuned for blog posts detailing more of our work!
Open Source Contributions: Flask-base
Flask-base is a batteries-included web framework that Hack4Impact Penn developed to make creating web-apps as easy as possible, by eliminating the need to re-develop common boilerplate with every project. This project has been hugely helpful in accelerating Penn’s ability to efficiently help organizations like Kiva, OSET, Juvenile Law Center, and Givology. It has been forked 172 times on Github, meaning that around 172 developers have leveraged it to build their own applications.
If you’re developing a web app, check out this recent post by Penn Co-Director Abhi Suri about how to use it! It may be able to save you as much time as it has for us. We also released a set of other blog posts, helping others apply technology for social good.
Events
In August 2017, we brought together 80 students interested in the intersection of social impact and technology for a speaker event in San Francisco. During the event, we discussed different avenues available to students to do tech-enabled social impact, and introduced our chapter program to the world. A special thank you to Ankit Shah from Airbnb for partnering with us, to discuss the many ways he’s been able to integrate social impact into his life and into his current role on Airbnb’s Human team.
Our chapters have hosted numerous other events this year, including project demos and educational talks at their universities and hackathons.
Get In Touch
If you’re a nonprofit, and would like to submit a project for one of our chapters to work on, please see our interest form here and our project application form here. More information about how our nonprofit project process works can be found here: https://hack4impact.org/nonprofits.
If you have questions or comments of any sort, feel free to shoot us an email at national@hack4impact.org.
As much as we’ve collectively accomplished this past year, we are eager and excited for 2018. In the upcoming year, we hope to continue initiating new chapters at universities, strengthening the network among current chapters, and delivering as much impact as we can.
And finally, we just want to express our most sincere thanks and congratulations to all chapters, chapter leaders, students, and nonprofit partners for the thoughtfulness and hard work that you put in this year.
All the best,
Jonathan Dubin and Maya Ebsworth
Hack4Impact National Co-Directors
