Community Connect

People often need practical, non-emergency help but don’t know which local group to contact, while students, volunteers, local businesses, and organisations who could help are hard to find. CommunityConnect brings both sides together. Providers publish self-reported skills, availability, languages, and travel distance. Seekers write their need in ordinary language (Italian or English) and can review and edit suggested category, skills, place, urgency, and availability before submitting. Emergencies and requests needing medical or legal professionals are screened out of ordinary matching. Businesses can use CommunityConnect to reach the people who need what they offer. A local business, social enterprise, or NGO registers as an organisation, lists its services in the public directory, and receives matched requests from nearby people who are looking for that kind of help. It decides which requests to accept, so it only spends time on relevant ones. The app checks provider eligibility first, then ranks eligible providers using multilingual text embeddings plus structured signals such as municipality distance. It shows the score components rather than a black-box number. A provider accepts, then the seeker separately confirms, and only then do contact details appear, so both sides stay in control of their privacy. AI is optional: if the service is down, local rules keep basic intake working. It is an early prototype with self-reported profiles, and the next step is a small Genova pilot with local businesses and organisations.