Turtle Shelter Project Platform
Developed a full-stack web platform during BYU’s INTEX competition to help the Turtle Shelter Project nonprofit manage volunteers, events, and service opportunities supporting individuals experiencing homelessness.
Project overview
During BYU’s one-week INTEX development competition, our team designed and built a full-stack web platform for the Turtle Shelter Project, a nonprofit organization that coordinates service opportunities to support individuals experiencing homelessness. The platform allows administrators to manage events, track volunteer participation, and assign user roles, while also enabling anonymous users to request new service opportunities. In addition to the web platform, we analyzed HUD’s Point-in-Time (PIT) dataset to better understand homelessness trends and created an interactive Tableau dashboard to visualize regional and demographic patterns. Although the system is not currently deployed on the official Turtle Shelter Project website, the project demonstrates how modern web technologies and data analysis can support nonprofit organizations in managing volunteers and making data-informed decisions.
Problem
The Turtle Shelter Project coordinates volunteer service opportunities for individuals experiencing homelessness. However, managing volunteers, scheduling events, and tracking participation can become difficult without a centralized system. Additionally, understanding homelessness trends requires analyzing complex datasets that are difficult to interpret without visualization tools.
Approach / process
Our team worked within the constraints of a one-week development competition, using an agile workflow to rapidly design and implement the platform. Early in the project, we designed an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) to model the database structure and define relationships between users, volunteers, events, and service requests. This allowed our team to clearly plan how data would be stored and accessed across the system. We focused on: Designing a relational database structure for events, volunteers, and users Creating an intuitive web interface for administrators to manage service opportunities Developing backend routes and APIs to handle event creation, volunteer tracking, and user roles Structuring the system architecture so frontend, backend, and database components worked together effectively Analyzing HUD homelessness datasets to uncover trends and insights The goal was to create both an operational platform for managing volunteer coordination and a data-driven perspective on homelessness through analytics and visualization.
Implementation details
The project used a traditional full-stack web architecture. Frontend HTML CSS JavaScript Bootstrap for responsive UI components Backend Node.js with Express RESTful routes for managing events, volunteers, and user roles PostgreSQL relational database Data Analysis Processed HUD Point-in-Time dataset using Python Built an interactive Tableau dashboard to visualize homelessness trends Infrastructure Hosted and tested deployment using AWS.
