SJA-SPONSORED: Social Justice Hackathon
On April 5-6th, the Student Justice Alliance proudly sponsored the Social Justice Track at Hack the Nest, the largest high school hackathon in the DMV area. Over 36 hours, hundreds of students gathered to build technology with purpose, and many chose to focus on justice.
The Social Justice Track challenged students to design projects that addressed real-world issues like housing inequality, educational access, and criminal justice reform. The creativity was astounding. One team built an app that maps under-resourced communities to connect them with local services. Another designed a tool that lets users fact-check headlines to combat misinformation. A third created a platform to track environmental injustices and allow people to contact their elected officials about them.
At our workshop, we helped participants explore how technology can support movements for change. We discussed redlining, policing, access to legal aid, and the digital divide. And we asked: How can we use our skills to better lives?
In the end, among the 12 projects we judged, we provided ElectConnect, a civic engagement platform, $400 in seed funding to continue building their app. ElectConnect is a mobile app that offers secure, personalized voting information, allowing users to register, engage in online town halls, and stay informed with tailored news updates, all designed to increase voter participation and civic engagement. Users receive news feeds that show the political leaning of media sources and can engage with candidates in video streams with live AI fact-checking.
Another one of the 12 projects we judged, EcoJustice, won the Grand Prize for Hack the Nest and received $800. EcoJustice leverages data from the CDC, EPA, and Census Bureau to create one comprehensive map. It uses a Social Vulnerability Index, calculated using 16 data points from the CDC, demographic data on minority-majority counties from the Census Bureau, and existing/proposed polluting facilities around the United States to view how potential proposed legislative and zoning bills would pollute minority populations and vulnerable communities. With this information, users can take action using the EcoJustice toolbox, which includes an AI Letter generator for direct communication with local representatives.
To sponsor this event, the Student Justice Alliance coordinated fundraising events by mobilizing eight of our student volunteers to raise over $2,000.
To the teams who coded with compassion and the mentors who made space for bold ideas: thank you. We can’t wait to see what you build next.
