carebnb

Inspiration

Carebnb was founded as a way for us to help people that needed it most. Across the nation, over 640,000 LGBT youths experience homelessness on a yearly basis. Additionally, approximately 196,500 people couldn’t find safe housing after leaving an abusive relationship. Our goal is to provide a verified, safe, secure, and private place for those people.

What it does

Carebnb provides a platform for homeowners to donate safe spaces to people who have been forcibly removed from their homes. This greatly helps LGBT youths whose parents aren't accepting of them, victims of domestic abuse, and anyone who just needs a safe place to stay.

How we built it

We went through many iterations and platforms before deciding to use Codeigniter and PHP. We considered using Ruby on Rails, as well as React.js, but PHP ended up being the easiest choice for us.

Challenges we ran into

Near the end of the submission window, when we began fully testing our site, we began getting multiple page errors. This meant that we had to quickly fix and test them again, before the deadline.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We wrote our own, custom authentication & authorization system. We also set up our own organized database structure, and successfully got the database working with the code.

What we learned

We learned how to use Codeigniter and PHP, as well as increasing our knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

About us

We created carebnb in 2018 at CincyHacks, Cincinnati’s original high school hackathon. We originally decided to make a platform designed to help LGBT youth find permanent housing. However, we then decided to shift our focus to the people who need help most — those who were unexpectedly forced to leave home. We also decided to expand and include anyone who needs help, including people leaving abusive relationships.