Ukrainian-Italian duo creates map of charities accepting items for donation

Today is International Kindness Day! And Ukrainian and Italian web developers Oleksandr Kostynskyi and Gianfranco Palumbo have made it easier to be kind. Their interactive map helpmap.io allows donating things to charitable organizations that need it. The map works like Wikipedia, users can add their own spots of collecting donations. It includes around 1000 organizations in Ukraine and a few in Germany, Hmarochos reported. Oleksandr Kostynskyi said that he wanted to "create an instrument which would stimulate the development of altruism, so people would be able to help other people in the real world." First, the developers created the mobile app givebox.xyz to give things from person to person. The app became popular quickly, but it turned out that often people don't come to pick up the thing they need, and the givers became demotivated and stopped using the app. To avoid such situations, the developers created a map of charitable organizations that accept donated items.

"There are several reasons why such a service is important: decreasing environmental pollution, as often things are discarded or burned. Also, it will promote saving natural resources used for the production of new items: instead of buying new things, you can perfectly use secondhand ones. And it allows helping those in need. Because many people want to help local charities but don't know how to do this exactly. As well, people often don't know what items these charities need: for instance, they bring candies and toys to an orphanage on St. Nicholas' Day, but the kids need socks, toothbrushes etc.," he added.