OUTCOME
The thing that we kept in mind the most throughout our project was the idea of wanting to build a bridge that would connect the people in need to the resources that are available to them. Not only this but we wanted to spread awareness and knowledge of the significance of homelessness and the most recent statistics possible. With our project, we were able to accomplish both of our goals with events that we hosted and the survey we conducted within our school. Our survey (shown in the Media tab) was conducted through technology which made it easier for us to spread the word. From our results, we noticed that not many people were aware of how big these numbers of homeless people within the Los Angeles County are getting. Before we made the survey, as a team we researched several statistics and we all learned something we didn't know before. Everyone knows that homelessness is a major issue that needs to be targeted, but with our survey we were able to bring some numbers into it. Our other major goal as a team was to have some sort of positive impact on people's lives. We were able to accomplish this through our events. Although the community we reached out to is very small, we were still able to make a huge impact. With the can food drive, we were able to donate over 300 cans to a local church in need. With the 5K we hosted in April, we were able to raise over $300 to make over 50 hygiene kits which were also donated. We do not plan on just stopping here, the whole concept behind doing a project like this is to "pay it forward". We plan on continuing with our project by designing a portable shower, which we unfortunately did not have time to create. We have made several connections with important people in our surrounding community, and we plan to expand our project even further. As a team, we are all extremely glad that we have been able to make a positive impact on people's lives.
REFLECTION
Looking back at our project there are several things that we would do differently. We faced many struggles throughout our project such as a lack of communication and time constraints. We realized that despite we are all part of the same team, we have lives outside of our project. Many of us are part of other clubs and we all have hectic educational/work schedules that require a lot of dedication, just like with this project. If we could go back to the beginning, we would have organized meetings based around each others schedules that would allow us all to meet at the same time and place. Despite these difficulties, we feel as though we were able to end on a strong note. Something that was extremely surprising was the turn out for our 5K, we didn't expect many people to show up, but to us we saw it as extremely successful. Not only that, but just being able to actually complete an event like this made us all extremely happy. We want to let the judges know that we do not plan on stopping here because a major part of our project has gone undone. We had to plan much of our meetings only during school hours which was extremely difficult, especially during the last week of the project. During the last week, one of our team members and our advisor were lucky enough to go to Germany for a Hydrogen Car Competition which put some constraints on when we had access to the engineering lab at our school. We plan to design a prototype for a portable shower and 3D print it in order to showcase it at the expo. Our work will continue even after this competition.
