Salvation Suppers is a non-profit organization founded in Burlington, VT in 2020. Its goal is to give back to the community by cooking healthy, delicious, and real food for those in need. The organization wanted to be a centerpiece for community outreach revolving around one of the biggest necessities--food.
Here is an excerpt from the founder, Nick Gambill:
"The goal of Salvation Suppers is to encourage and support community involvement. The centerpiece of our project is the Burlington Free Meals Program, a collaborative effort between local chefs and the Burlington Salvation Army. On Mondays we serve free dinners. Our network includes food professionals, artists, and students - all of whom Salvation Suppers supports in their efforts to give back to the community."
Wanting to get involved, my friend Ty and I reached out to Nick to see if he wanted a website. He loved the idea.
With the help of Nick's predetermined vision for the website, we build the website from scratch, raw HTML/CSS/JavaScript, while still juggling part-time jobs and being full-time university students. The ability to use our skills to help provide for our community is what kept us going. In addition, it was both of our first experience working with a real client on a real product. It made us think about many crucial aspects that developers ask: What presence do we want the website to give? How can we structure the website to best fit the needs for the diverse users that will access this website -- from all different places? What message did we want to convey? How can we make the user relate to the website? And, most importantly: How do we balance the relationship between what the client wants / expects and what is feasible with our resources? We got to work.
It was an awesome experience in all aspects. To build a real product for real people and to be able to give back to our community was empowering to say the least. The one downside is once we handed it over to the organization, it became very hard to update and continue working on the product. That being said, some things became outdated and some things could use a few tweaks here or there. But Nick is not worried about that, because he is very happy to have a home base online for Salvation Suppers to continue thriving. Ty and I are also very happy with how it came out, and that we could please the client as well.
You can see our work here.
Project Timeline: January, 2022 - May, 2022