CrowdIt. wins Rep. John Yarmuth’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in Kentucky’s Third District

When asked what inspired the creation of CrowdIt., the students said, ”All 3 of the developers have lived in Louisville all of their lives. A quintessential part of the city, aside from the luscious greenery, is the Ohio River. The river glistens from the cold days of Winter to the scorching days of Summer. We all remember walking along the banks of the Ohio and enjoying its beauty. Seeing pollution contaminate the river and depreciate it was a disheartening sight. The lessons of climate change and protecting the environment at school did not register with us because it was not something that we really experienced. It was as though we experienced the city of Louisville in a bubble. As we grew older, the grimier details became clearer. The plastic that clogs parts of the river; the foam bottles that litter our favorite parks and suffocate the dew of the grass buds; the smoke that created smog and smeared the city view. We began noticing these things and taking part of community activities that would allow us to make a change. We quickly realized that change relied on a few people. Even if hundreds were willing to participate in a community clean-up, how many would be willing to organize such an activity? Organizing events requires planning, outreach, and coordination skills. In short, our ability to clean up places in our city relies on the few organizers that were willing to initiate such activities. What if this could change? What if an event could be initiated, organized, and marketed in one app? What if we could consolidate these processes so that change could quite literally be at our fingertips? Asking these questions inspired us to create CrowdIt. Our unbridled passion for environmental remediation and our unwavering commitment to the city of Louisville, which has had an immeasurable impact on our identities, were the forces that birthed CrowdIt. Now, we hope that our app can reach all the residents of Louisville who look to take part in change and promote sustainable, clean environments. Eventually, we hope that our app can reach dozens of other cities and thousands of other people so that they too can take part in cleaning up their local environments and make a change. Change is an every crowd, we just need a way to unlock it, and this principle is exactly what CrowdIt was built upon.”