Tommie Buildfest 2026

Our thoughts

Tommie Buildfest was the University of St. Thomas's first 24 hour AI hackathon, run by the student club Nexus AI with support from the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship and the Center for the Common Good. Participants from high school through graduate school built websites and apps to help nonprofits fight hunger and food insecurity. FlowDevs served as judges and spent the event working alongside the builders, helping teams shape their ideas, get past technical roadblocks and turn prototypes into something a nonprofit could actually use. The teams worked with real community partners in mind, including Tommie Shelf (the on campus grocery give away), Loaves and Fishes, which serves free meals across the Twin Cities, and The Food Group, which runs a food bank, a traveling grocery in a converted school bus and a farm program. As faculty adviser Jonathan Keiser put it to the Pioneer Press: "The organizations that would benefit the most from this probably have the least resources and are the least connected." What the teams built: 1st place, Sofa: a tech driven tool to improve food access for underserved communities, built by Maria Magambo, Precious Obonyo and Nimo Hassan. 2nd place, CarryOn. 3rd place, RoutesForGood. Our takeaway: this is AI used the right way, pointed at small organizations that could never afford custom software on their own. It is the same idea behind our work: build the tool around the real process, then make it simple enough that a busy team actually uses it.