Direct2Food

I just recently wrapped up work on Direct2Food for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago! It's nothing short of unbelievably exciting for me... This website has been in heavy development of various sorts for the last year plus a handful of months. I was practically doing cartwheels.

Uh, great... So what IS Direct2Food, anyway?

It's a site developed for the Illinois Food and Nutrition Advocacy Partnership designed to help members of the metropolitan Chicago community access the information and resources necessary to ensure food is on their tables. It does that by helping both service providers and consumers locate food pantries, soup kitchens, and meal programs closest to them as well as helping to determine if they are eligible for further assistance like food stamps and resources for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

It's set up so a site visitor enters in a ZIP code and answers a few yes/no questions about their own personal situation which then in turn matches them to food programs in their area that may be able to provide assistance based on those agencies' particular missions. You then get a listing of the specific services offered, hours of operation, and who to contact with additional questions as well as a map and other useful information. Or you can browse via a map with all of the programs color-coded and listed in proximity from a given ZIP code.

Pretty nifty... and it's a service that has the potential to do a lot of good. Especially in tandem with it's sister site, Direct2Housing.

It holds a lot of information - Roughly 1,200 or so listings from the get go and agencies can apply to add their own. To make things easier, we had to put in a way to import large volumes of information which took some time considering the site also had to geolocate and categorize the data on the fly.

But it's done and I'm on to the next! Go check out Direct2Food!