Gadgetory

in the past few decades Silicon Valley has quickly become one of the most economically vibrant places on earth because of this localized inflation has caused the cost of living in San Francisco to skyrocket there are many nonprofits serving the homeless and low-income communities but there are certain needs that simply can't be met by large organizations enter hand up the public benefit company that acts like a Kickstarter for people in need homelessness is not just one thing it's not just the typical stereotype people think of people who are are homeless who have full-time jobs who are sick who are all coming from all walks of life housing is is a huge issue it's just it's so expensive to live here oh it's a great place to live i love it but it just yeah the the cost of rents are escalating they already were high escalating really quickly our clients have all kinds of challenges in their lives but even the ones who do awesome and you get this great full-time job you know even then it's really hard to raise a family here you know it's just the incomes are not on par at all with the cost of living so hand up is a direct donation system for homeless people and other people in need that lets you donate directly to a specific person that you want to help and then a hundred percent of the funds go directly towards food medical care housing and other basic needs for that person so this is the hand up homepage we really try to emphasize the human connections as much as possible so we see this banner of a lot of our members is there totally random selection of members what we're doing is using technology to help create a bridge so that the community and can help directly we are building technology for people in poverty and for human service organizations and we're also a for-profit technology startup but we are a new kind of for-profit called a public benefit corporation and so that lets us have the growth of a traditional for profit while also having the values of a social a socially driven organization so the way hand up works is we build the technology and we partner with nonprofits that already serve the homeless and at-risk community so we sign up an organization like compass Family Services teach them how to use our software and then the case managers will administer the site my name is kevin and i hope to get into a one bedroom apartment what I want most of all especially for Christmas I don't want two front teeth I my whole said and I hope to receive a bed anak tools like box open-end wrenches socket ratchets breaker bars pipe wrench crescent wrench screwdriver micrometer early looking for employment I don't have any codes to uh for the interview any kind of job you have to have teeth and you just look really funny and sound really funny when you don't have your teeth so being employed against on my list one of hand ups many success stories is single mother Janelle who needed a computer to finish her online school so I'm a single mother of two boys and i work in san francisco for human service agency and i go to school at x equal city college i had enrolled in an online class and i didn't have a computer so i was using the computer at work don't tell anyone to do my assignments in and so as i was like no you need a computer so she told me about hand up and she said you should just create a create a profile and see if they can help me i did that and my request was granted in like 24 hours i think the donors were just awesome they were just I'm happy to help I think she put in a request for about five hundred dollars for a computer and someone donated four hundred dollars to her right off the pad and just knowing that there are people out there who would do that and you know just for a stranger I think that's been really cool and really surprising to see one thing that hand up does is tries to create this two-way communication between our members and their donors so on the bottom we see the most recent update that Janelle sent thinking the donors for all the help that they give in so on the right side we see this is how you can donate to Janelle's account and then there's also the option to add a five dollar tip hand up and this is basically how we support our operations we even cover the credit card processing costs so we make sure that if you select fifty dollars then fifty dollars goes to Janelle and then I have the opportunity to respond here as donor and right Jenelle little message so it really starts to create this community feel and support network a lot like your facebook friends would technology isn't you know isn't a silver bullet it's not going to to completely solve poverty but just in my experience working in nonprofits working with incredibly vulnerable populations it's so powerful as a tool to reach more people and really importantly for our model is sharing the story with an estimated 3.5 million homeless people in the United States and countless more teetering on the brink low-income America needs all the help it can get hopefully for-profit models like hand up are able to both maintain profitability and more importantly adhere to their founding documents