Foster Nation

Problem

One of Foster Nation’s key initiatives is a holiday gift campaign that helps foster youth fulfill their gift wishes. Last year, the process was managed entirely by hand-collecting wish lists from youth and manually uploading them to a dashboard where donors could contribute. The initiative was a huge success, drawing overwhelming interest and support. Building on this momentum, Foster Nation now aims to expand the program beyond the holiday season, making it available year-round. To sustain this growth, they are also focused on creating a more scalable system that reduces the manual effort required for the process.

Solution

We developed a gift donation portal, Kind Space, designed to serve foster youth, donors, and Foster Nation administrators.

• For foster youth: The portal allows youth to submit detailed gift requests, including descriptions, photos, and explanations of how the gift would benefit them. They can also track the status of their requests—from submission, to admin approval, to fulfillment.

• For Foster Nation administrators: Admins have access to an internal dashboard where they can review and verify gift requests before they are published.

• For donors: Donors can browse all verified requests through a user-friendly dashboard and directly fulfill them online. This streamlined system makes it easy for donors to connect with foster youth and provide meaningful support.

By creating a centralized, scalable platform, the portal transforms what was once a manual, seasonal effort into an accessible, year-round initiative—empowering youth, engaging donors, and reducing administrative overhead.

Design 

The portal needed to serve three distinct user groups - foster youth, donors, and Foster Nation administrators - each with unique goals and workflows. To address this, we designed separate, but interconnected experiences within a single platform. 

For foster youth, we created straightforward forms to submit gift requests with essential information. Donors were given a curated dashboard that surfaces only verified requests, making it easy to browse, select, and fulfill wishes directly. For administrators, we designed a review and approval workflow to efficiently verify submissions before they appear to donors.

A major design challenge was ensuring these three perspectives aligned seamlessly. We maintained consistency in navigation and status updates across roles so that youth could track their requests, admins could manage approvals efficiently, and donors could trust that every gift listed was authentic and ready to be fulfilled.

Tech Stack

Foster Nation is a full-stack MERN application (MongoDB, ExpressJS, React, NodeJS). The frontend is built with React and styled using Chakra UI. The backend is powered by ExpressJS and NodeJS, with MongoDB serving as the primary database. 

We integrated Stripe API to securely handle donations, and used AWS for storing documents specific to the gift requests and foster youth. In addition, Salesforce CRM is utilized to manage and organize foster youth and donor information.