Henry Hung Chun Cheng ¹ and Alejandro Nava Aldana ² , ¹ Suffield Academy, 185 N. Main St. Suffield, ²University of California Irvine, Irvine

Volunteer engagement among high school students faces persistent challenges including fragmented resources, lack of accessible training, and difficulty discovering local opportunities. SupportCircle is a cross-platform mobile application built with Flutter and Firebase that addresses these challenges by integrating four key components: an AI-powered chat assistant using GPT-4o-mini for real-time volunteer guidance, a Google Maps-based discovery system that executes parallel API searches to identify nearby service opportunities, a structured training module system with reactive real-time progress tracking via RxDart and Cloud Firestore, and a calendar-based service hour logger with atomic batch writes ensuring data consistency. Experimental evaluation demonstrated strong AI response quality averaging 25.8/30 across five volunteer categories, and the parallel search architecture reduced location discovery time by 73.4% compared to sequential execution. By unifying training, tracking, discovery, and AI assistance into a single mobile-native interface, SupportCircle provides a comprehensive, friction-reducing platform that empowers young volunteers supporting children and families.

Community Service, Volunteer Management, Mobile Application, Artificial Intelligence, Location-Based Services, Firebase, Flutter, CASA, Service Hour Tracking, Training Modules