8 ms·

I've constantly racked my brain on the Underserved Communities and Social Services: my dad is a Vietnam vet and my mom (while we were growing up) fit that singl

I've constantly racked my brain on the Underserved Communities and Social Services: my dad is a Vietnam vet and my mom (while we were growing up) fit that single mother middle-class type...how does technology help them? Part of the problem is they aren't tech savvy the way the HN community is - so what works for our community doesn't exactly work for theirs, or that they even use technology to the extent that we do (i.e. does technology even solve this problem?). The other problem is revenue/profitability...this population is inherently cash-strapped, so trying to create a technology solution that likely lies in the Tech-meets-Consumer Discretionary industry, well, who among these people can (and will) afford such services? It frustrates me to no end...because I want to help, but I can't seem to find a viable solution whenever I build something out. It's further a problem because it doesn't follow the general YC/Paul Graham rules for creating solutions - solving your own problems. Most techies aren't also veterans or single mothers, so while it was a problem I experienced second hand growing up, it's not something I live with today, other than my innate desire to help others. It's very hard to solve a problem you can't experience first hand. Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve these kinds of problems? Am I approaching it wrong?

maxerickson 10y ago
The first step is to articulate specific problems. The link does a little bit, but people with minimal savings don't actually care that they are unbanked; paying Walmart $3 to cash a check isn't that terrible a deal (Even if it isn't a great deal).
Lordarminius 10y ago
> I've constantly racked my brain...Am I approaching it wrong?... I don't think so and I have a similar problem as you. Certain problems have already been solved by other methods and wont yield to digitization. What is needed is simply a transplanting of existing tech to under served sectors.There are many businesses that are profitable without the need for extreme tech innovation. My peeve for instance, is that in my part of the world certain kinds of farming (rice, oil palm)yield decent and more or less assured profits (>500% over a decade) and there is no need for new technology other than that which already exists. This could logically fall under agriculture. The main barrier is relatively small amounts of capital (<200k - 1M usd) but try telling that to unicorn obsessed VC's looking for the next Snapchat.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Regarding the agriculture you bring up, the real issue here is contracts. Suppose you lend a bunch of Kerala palm oil orchards $1M, hoping to make $5M over a decade. Do you really trust the Communist government of Kerala to enforce your contracts and transfer wealth from poor local farmers back to the rich (likely foreign) capitalists who made them loans? That's the problem to solve. If you can solve it I don't see a reason why anyone wouldn't fund you.
  - Lordarminius 10y ago
    I would argue that solving the problem of contract enforcement is beyond the scope of any entrepreneur. However I do see your point and appreciate its merit. By the same token, if YC was unduly worried about that, they would never be able to fund (tech) companies that operate principally outside the west because the problem you allude to has never really been solved satisfactorily. But here's my point: as YC becomes larger and looks for growth outside its traditional areas, its model must evolve. Right now it does seem a bit scattershot. Is it a VC or an Angel? What is the place and relationship of charity and the entrepreneurs it sponsors? It claims to invest in founders predominantly over their ideas, but everyone I know who applies, does so with the thought at the back of their minds, that the de-facto situation is one in which an idea which cannot be a billion dollar company is best left at home. Whats wrong with funding a company that has the potential to reach 100M? I guess what I mean to say is: for the larger mission YC espouses, the funding model is broken; indeed the mission itself is unclear. For those like me who aspire to be funded this creates much frustration
    - harryh 10y ago
      Whats wrong with funding a company that has the potential to reach 100M? Nothing is wrong with doing such a thing. It's just not the business most Silicon Valley VCs are in. VCs are in the business of taking on large risk in pursuit of a large return, not taking on small (or medium) risk in pursuit of a small (or medium) return. You don't get mad at a butcher because they're in the business of selling meat and not vegetables. Same thing here.
    - 10y ago
Swizec 10y ago
> Most techies aren't also veterans or single mothers Hire them. They're cash strapped and need money. You're knowledge strapped and need insight. There's bound to be a way to make those two facts work together so it benefits both parties.
- snerbles 10y ago
  Good luck finding them - most of us go to inland state schools and fly under the prestige of the likes of Stanford and UC Berkeley. EDIT - For clarity, I'm a veteran graduate of a state school.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Am I reading correctly that you think single mothers and veterans will refuse to work with techies that lack a Stanford pedigree?
    - snerbles 10y ago
      Other way around - I could have done a better job of phrasing that. Not many Stanford undergraduates are veterans or single mothers, and members of that startup talent pool are unlikely to go looking for them.
      - tptacek 10y ago
        Ah, that makes more sense.
- icebraining 10y ago
  What if you're also cash strapped? :)
GFischer 10y ago
I agree that it's harder to solve a problem that you're not experiencing, but, by the same token, underserved communities will tolerate an even lower threshold of quality as long as you're helping them :) For the approach on how to solve their problems, the main goal is empathy. Look at the Design Thinking theory: first step is to emphatize. When I was taking a marketing course, they told us to shadow a consumer. You have to "walk a mile in their shoes" For example, I've been very impressed by the use of artificial impairments to simulate the experience of people with real disabilities. Once you -really- understand their problems, I'm pretty sure any sharp mind here will come up with interesting solutions. Edit: Design School http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/ http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/ Look for the Bootcamp material too: https://dschool.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/wiki/36873/attachments/74b3d/ModeGuideBOOTCAMP2010L.pdf https://dschool.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/... HOW to empathize To empathize, you: - Observe. View users and their behavior in the context of their lives. As much as possible do observations in relevant contexts in addition to interviews. Some of the most powerful realizations come from noticing a disconnect between what someone says and what he does. Others come from a work-around someone has created which may be very surprising to you as the designer, but she may not even think to mention in conversation. - Engage. Sometimes we call this technique ‘interviewing’ but it should really feel more like a conversation. Prepare some questions you’d like to ask, but expect to let the conversation deviate from them. Keep the conversation only loosely bounded. Elicit stories from the people you talk to, and always ask “Why?” to uncover deeper meaning. Engagement can come through both short ‘intercept’ encounters and longer scheduled conversations. - Watch and Listen. Certainly you can, and should, combine observation and engagement. Ask someone to show you how they complete a task. Have them physically go through the steps, and talk you through why they are doing what they do. Ask them to vocalize what’s going through their mind as they perform a task or interact with an object. Have a conversation in the context of someone’s home or workplace – so many stories are embodied in artifacts. Use the environment to prompt deeper questions.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Empathy might help you find and understand their problems; the problem seems to be how to finance the solution. When selling to a well-to-do middle-class professional, you're probably competing for cash that would otherwise go to purchase some toy or extra night out. When selling to the working-class, you're often competing against rent and food. Essentially, how to sell to someone who has no discretionary income?
zipfle 10y ago
Make blue apron for food pantries. One summer I volunteered on a kind of food pantry truck; twice a week, we'd load up this box truck with whatever the local supermarkets had donated-- pallets of turnips about to expire, pallets of bread, cucumbers, whatever--and we'd drive to some designated areas, set the food out on tables, and people would line up to collect a share of it. We had to limit based on availability; maybe two loaves of bread, three cucumbers, as many turnips as you want. The donations we got were usually either past their best or unpopular or both. When food expires, there's a period when it's still fine to eat, but it's best not to leave it too long. So if you're a single parent working two jobs, and you get home at 7:30 to make dinner and you have a turnip you need to use tonight before it goes bad, what do you do? Wouldn't it be great if someone with great logistics skill and insight into the stocks of all the area food banks could scrape allrecipes, find the most efficient use of the stock as ingredients, and maybe move some things around so that the people waiting for the trucks could get meal kits with online instructions, rather than just bags of turnips? Just a thought. Edit: The cool part of this might end up being the supplier side. I imagine that a supermarket has to work much harder to donate to a food pantry than to just throw out stuff. How could you make it easier for them to donate what was really needed? Could you have finders who go around to stores, enter the stuff to be thrown out into your system, decide what it would be worth it to take, take it, and keep track of yearly donations for the retailer for tax purposes? Could you cut their waste disposal costs and save them taxes and build goodwill? The bigger idea here is that just because the consumers of your service aren't very focused on new technology doesn't mean that technology can't drive and enable your business model. There are probably many kinds of businesses that provide services to the underprivileged that would benefit from technology in the back office even if technology isn't their product.
- cfreeman 10y ago
  I love this idea. I think bringing the idea of blue apron to a lower income market would be amazing, especially if it could take advantage of government incentives. One of the hardest things about cooking healthy is doing all the meal planning.
- acconrad 10y ago
  I actually had an idea around that - neighborhood cooking. There is definitely some widow grandmother on my block who would love to make some extra money cooking her awesome meals for her neighbors. And I'd love to pay for that service. Unfortunately state regulations for what is defined as a kitchen and cooking for others has huge health code implications, and never took off. This, what you're saying, is more of a logistics and resource allocation problem, all needing to be done in real time. Very smart, but would require quite a bit of up-front innovation. I'll ruminate on this idea for sure!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
prawn 10y ago
My first thought on that entry was a way of distributing earnings more frequently than weekly or fortnightly. Are people more inclined to blow their paycheque on entertainment if it's a bigger lump sum? And maybe a way of automating a certain type of withholding to build an emergency fund, or pay for bills. We grant concessions for retirement savings. Maybe the same for certain types of saving for essential bills? Water, gas, etc. I don't really trust many services not to fleece their customers though.
- wastedhours 10y ago
  I'd be really interested in this as a concept - a regressive pre-tax deduction for basic utilities. As you say, the issue will be for utility companies not to jack prices to take advantage, but offsetting some tax revenue from income would lead to an increase (potentially) from VAT/sales tax because of more discretionary income?
orthoganol 10y ago
> Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve these kinds of problems? Redistribute advantages, using that term in a broad way. That's what the underprivileged actually need. The US government will likely never solve it, so the best I can imagine is a platform that connects the poor with successful, wealthy people who meet with them semi-regularly and actually give them money upon completing plans that they design together. If a successful person was willing to enter your life and give you money if you worked with them to achieve some goals, you would be in a significantly better position. At scale it would change society.
icantdrive55 10y ago
I have been on welfare on the past--only medi-cal. I once applied for food stamps, and was honestly too embarrassed to walk into that building. My situation is better now. I know a tiny amount about how the federal, state, and county system work. I can just tell you what I know. It's a huge job--yes, we all know that. Most people end up with a small one page website that lists agencies. A lot of the non-profits really don't seem to help. I know of too many that just exploit the needy, with a 501C3 that is just around to because the founder needed a job. A lot have a one person making a good living, a bunch of under paid employees/volunteers, and a dubious mission statement. You find yourself thinking, "What do they do? I seems like all they do is write for grant money. Why is only one person in this organization getting a livable wage?" I got off track on the non-profits, sorry. If you are pyhsically, or mentally disabled; there's SSDI (if you worked in the past), and the threshold to qualify is pretty steep. Basifically, if you can lift a shovel--you don't qualify. If you have a psychiatric disorder, it's a bitch. The disability doctors do a horrid job deciding who should receive help. This is one huge problem. I don't know how to fix it. Determining the severity of a mental illness is still a huge Art. There are biased disability Doctor. I had a friend collecting SSDI, and the doctor told him, "Don't come back to this hospital for any help. The other doctors aren't as sympathetic as myself." This was my best friend. He was very excentric, but had a huge heart. I couldn't imagine him holding down any job. I used to hire him for side jobs, but it was only because I wanted him around, and knew he needed money. He was useless at job sites. I can't imagine him doing anything. Applying for medi-cal. It's not as bad as it used to be because of Obamacare. That's all I can say right now. One area that needs improvement is the way they pay for medication. They only give a person a months supply of a drug. Instead of going to a boutique pharmacy, and getting the medication for free; I gave found it more cost effective to just pay out of pocket at Costco. I buy 90 day supplies. Food stamps. It was horrid for awhile. Bill Clinton decided to get cute, and put time limits/restraints of receiving food stamps. Yea--that liberal guy. Obama took away the time limits. It's still very degrading. People on food stamps don't know what to buy sometimes. I recall a lady being told at a checkout she couldn't buy orange juice. It had to be concentrated. She said, but the concentrated is twice to price, and I get more in the container? Another time, a mother was told she couldn't buy cake mix, for her daughter birthday. The check out guy said, "You have to buy flour, butter, salt--sugar--whatever separately--miss. I didn't write the crazy rules--miss." The women just put her head down, took her daughters hand, and quietly left Safeway. Problems I see in the food stamp program. Make it less degrading. I don't see the need for a physical interview by a county worker--with that fake smile. Eligibility could be determined electronically. (One county worker once told me they make these programs intentionally difficult to apply to. They do it on purpose.) Section 8 housing. There's just not enough apartments. People who got on the waiting list, and got a place are Very lucky. The housing units have a lot of restrictions, a lot of petty restrictions. They basically tell people how to live, in a 47 page lease, at least in Marin County. (The county doesn't have it online--yes--they don't want it out there). I have a copy. One day, I will scan, and post the lease. It will look like these people were living in 50's Russia. Half of the restrictions are laugh out lot ridiculous. I'm getting tired of writing. These problems are hard to solve, but we need people like you who want to make it better. I am thinking about a website that is geared towards the homeless, for a few years now, but procrastinating. I don't just want to list agencies. I do know this, white males don't know much about the programs we have. Part of their ignorance is pride. Part of it is there is no real help. Part is they have just given up. Part of the problem is they have just given up. I had to repeat that because that's what I'm seeing. Maybe if we helped them before they spent years homless--they might have more inititative to try? There's a saying on the streets, it goes like this, "Homeless for a year, homeless for life!" In my county, we basically have one place for the homeless to get out of the elements, very important during the winter months. It is geared more for women, and it's always filled. We have some churches that let a a few homless spend the night on their property during certain winter months. The neighbors are constantly complaining. It's fear, and NIMBY's. There hasen't been one arrest that I'm aware of. I am now depressed. I know two guys whom are homeless. Both said the same thing. "All I want is a legal place to pitch a tent, and have access to a outhouse." There's nowhere to sleep for these people--legally. No county land--nothing. They are all technically breaking the law when they crawl in that Scotch broom thicket. The cops do give them tickets. And the cycle starts. They can't pay the tickets, and blah, blah blah. We complain because they are in the parks, or sleeping on the sidewalk, but where exactly are they suppose to go? We need to streamline the other programs, but we have an emergency right now. I went on a rant--sorry. I too think about the poor, and homeless daily. I know I could easily be one of them--in the bat of an eye.
khuknows 10y ago
> Part of the problem is they aren't tech savvy the way the HN community is - so what works for our community doesn't exactly work for theirs, or that they even use technology to the extent that we do (i.e. does technology even solve this problem?). > The other problem is revenue/profitability...this population is inherently cash-strapped, so trying to create a technology solution that likely lies in the Tech-meets-Consumer Discretionary industry, well, who among these people can (and will) afford such services? Maybe we should be looking at a different "group" as the users of the services we could provide. For example, the government. Governments spend billions on social services, so perhaps we could be creating technology that could improve their efficiency and reduce their costs, which in theory would lead to more/better support for undeserved communities. Not saying that's much easier, but it's another way we can try help.

maxerickson 10y ago

The first step is to articulate specific problems. The link does a little bit, but people with minimal savings don't actually care that they are unbanked; paying Walmart $3 to cash a check isn't that terrible a deal (Even if it isn't a great deal).

Lordarminius 10y ago

> I've constantly racked my brain...Am I approaching it wrong?... I don't think so and I have a similar problem as you. Certain problems have already been solved by other methods and wont yield to digitization. What is needed is simply a transplanting of existing tech to under served sectors.There are many businesses that are profitable without the need for extreme tech innovation. My peeve for instance, is that in my part of the world certain kinds of farming (rice, oil palm)yield decent and more or less assured profits (>500% over a decade) and there is no need for new technology other than that which already exists. This could logically fall under agriculture. The main barrier is relatively small amounts of capital (<200k - 1M usd) but try telling that to unicorn obsessed VC's looking for the next Snapchat.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Regarding the agriculture you bring up, the real issue here is contracts. Suppose you lend a bunch of Kerala palm oil orchards $1M, hoping to make $5M over a decade. Do you really trust the Communist government of Kerala to enforce your contracts and transfer wealth from poor local farmers back to the rich (likely foreign) capitalists who made them loans? That's the problem to solve. If you can solve it I don't see a reason why anyone wouldn't fund you.
- Lordarminius 10y ago
  I would argue that solving the problem of contract enforcement is beyond the scope of any entrepreneur. However I do see your point and appreciate its merit. By the same token, if YC was unduly worried about that, they would never be able to fund (tech) companies that operate principally outside the west because the problem you allude to has never really been solved satisfactorily. But here's my point: as YC becomes larger and looks for growth outside its traditional areas, its model must evolve. Right now it does seem a bit scattershot. Is it a VC or an Angel? What is the place and relationship of charity and the entrepreneurs it sponsors? It claims to invest in founders predominantly over their ideas, but everyone I know who applies, does so with the thought at the back of their minds, that the de-facto situation is one in which an idea which cannot be a billion dollar company is best left at home. Whats wrong with funding a company that has the potential to reach 100M? I guess what I mean to say is: for the larger mission YC espouses, the funding model is broken; indeed the mission itself is unclear. For those like me who aspire to be funded this creates much frustration
  - harryh 10y ago
    Whats wrong with funding a company that has the potential to reach 100M? Nothing is wrong with doing such a thing. It's just not the business most Silicon Valley VCs are in. VCs are in the business of taking on large risk in pursuit of a large return, not taking on small (or medium) risk in pursuit of a small (or medium) return. You don't get mad at a butcher because they're in the business of selling meat and not vegetables. Same thing here.
  - 10y ago

Swizec 10y ago

> Most techies aren't also veterans or single mothers Hire them. They're cash strapped and need money. You're knowledge strapped and need insight. There's bound to be a way to make those two facts work together so it benefits both parties.

snerbles 10y ago
Good luck finding them - most of us go to inland state schools and fly under the prestige of the likes of Stanford and UC Berkeley. EDIT - For clarity, I'm a veteran graduate of a state school.
- tptacek 10y ago
  Am I reading correctly that you think single mothers and veterans will refuse to work with techies that lack a Stanford pedigree?
  - snerbles 10y ago
    Other way around - I could have done a better job of phrasing that. Not many Stanford undergraduates are veterans or single mothers, and members of that startup talent pool are unlikely to go looking for them.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Ah, that makes more sense.
icebraining 10y ago
What if you're also cash strapped? :)

GFischer 10y ago

I agree that it's harder to solve a problem that you're not experiencing, but, by the same token, underserved communities will tolerate an even lower threshold of quality as long as you're helping them :) For the approach on how to solve their problems, the main goal is empathy. Look at the Design Thinking theory: first step is to emphatize. When I was taking a marketing course, they told us to shadow a consumer. You have to "walk a mile in their shoes" For example, I've been very impressed by the use of artificial impairments to simulate the experience of people with real disabilities. Once you -really- understand their problems, I'm pretty sure any sharp mind here will come up with interesting solutions. Edit: Design School http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/ http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/ Look for the Bootcamp material too: https://dschool.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/wiki/36873/attachments/74b3d/ModeGuideBOOTCAMP2010L.pdf https://dschool.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/... HOW to empathize To empathize, you: - Observe. View users and their behavior in the context of their lives. As much as possible do observations in relevant contexts in addition to interviews. Some of the most powerful realizations come from noticing a disconnect between what someone says and what he does. Others come from a work-around someone has created which may be very surprising to you as the designer, but she may not even think to mention in conversation. - Engage. Sometimes we call this technique ‘interviewing’ but it should really feel more like a conversation. Prepare some questions you’d like to ask, but expect to let the conversation deviate from them. Keep the conversation only loosely bounded. Elicit stories from the people you talk to, and always ask “Why?” to uncover deeper meaning. Engagement can come through both short ‘intercept’ encounters and longer scheduled conversations. - Watch and Listen. Certainly you can, and should, combine observation and engagement. Ask someone to show you how they complete a task. Have them physically go through the steps, and talk you through why they are doing what they do. Ask them to vocalize what’s going through their mind as they perform a task or interact with an object. Have a conversation in the context of someone’s home or workplace – so many stories are embodied in artifacts. Use the environment to prompt deeper questions.

icebraining 10y ago
Empathy might help you find and understand their problems; the problem seems to be how to finance the solution. When selling to a well-to-do middle-class professional, you're probably competing for cash that would otherwise go to purchase some toy or extra night out. When selling to the working-class, you're often competing against rent and food. Essentially, how to sell to someone who has no discretionary income?

zipfle 10y ago

Make blue apron for food pantries. One summer I volunteered on a kind of food pantry truck; twice a week, we'd load up this box truck with whatever the local supermarkets had donated-- pallets of turnips about to expire, pallets of bread, cucumbers, whatever--and we'd drive to some designated areas, set the food out on tables, and people would line up to collect a share of it. We had to limit based on availability; maybe two loaves of bread, three cucumbers, as many turnips as you want. The donations we got were usually either past their best or unpopular or both. When food expires, there's a period when it's still fine to eat, but it's best not to leave it too long. So if you're a single parent working two jobs, and you get home at 7:30 to make dinner and you have a turnip you need to use tonight before it goes bad, what do you do? Wouldn't it be great if someone with great logistics skill and insight into the stocks of all the area food banks could scrape allrecipes, find the most efficient use of the stock as ingredients, and maybe move some things around so that the people waiting for the trucks could get meal kits with online instructions, rather than just bags of turnips? Just a thought. Edit: The cool part of this might end up being the supplier side. I imagine that a supermarket has to work much harder to donate to a food pantry than to just throw out stuff. How could you make it easier for them to donate what was really needed? Could you have finders who go around to stores, enter the stuff to be thrown out into your system, decide what it would be worth it to take, take it, and keep track of yearly donations for the retailer for tax purposes? Could you cut their waste disposal costs and save them taxes and build goodwill? The bigger idea here is that just because the consumers of your service aren't very focused on new technology doesn't mean that technology can't drive and enable your business model. There are probably many kinds of businesses that provide services to the underprivileged that would benefit from technology in the back office even if technology isn't their product.

cfreeman 10y ago
I love this idea. I think bringing the idea of blue apron to a lower income market would be amazing, especially if it could take advantage of government incentives. One of the hardest things about cooking healthy is doing all the meal planning.
acconrad 10y ago
I actually had an idea around that - neighborhood cooking. There is definitely some widow grandmother on my block who would love to make some extra money cooking her awesome meals for her neighbors. And I'd love to pay for that service. Unfortunately state regulations for what is defined as a kitchen and cooking for others has huge health code implications, and never took off. This, what you're saying, is more of a logistics and resource allocation problem, all needing to be done in real time. Very smart, but would require quite a bit of up-front innovation. I'll ruminate on this idea for sure!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

prawn 10y ago

My first thought on that entry was a way of distributing earnings more frequently than weekly or fortnightly. Are people more inclined to blow their paycheque on entertainment if it's a bigger lump sum? And maybe a way of automating a certain type of withholding to build an emergency fund, or pay for bills. We grant concessions for retirement savings. Maybe the same for certain types of saving for essential bills? Water, gas, etc. I don't really trust many services not to fleece their customers though.

wastedhours 10y ago
I'd be really interested in this as a concept - a regressive pre-tax deduction for basic utilities. As you say, the issue will be for utility companies not to jack prices to take advantage, but offsetting some tax revenue from income would lead to an increase (potentially) from VAT/sales tax because of more discretionary income?

orthoganol 10y ago

> Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve these kinds of problems? Redistribute advantages, using that term in a broad way. That's what the underprivileged actually need. The US government will likely never solve it, so the best I can imagine is a platform that connects the poor with successful, wealthy people who meet with them semi-regularly and actually give them money upon completing plans that they design together. If a successful person was willing to enter your life and give you money if you worked with them to achieve some goals, you would be in a significantly better position. At scale it would change society.

icantdrive55 10y ago

I have been on welfare on the past--only medi-cal. I once applied for food stamps, and was honestly too embarrassed to walk into that building. My situation is better now. I know a tiny amount about how the federal, state, and county system work. I can just tell you what I know. It's a huge job--yes, we all know that. Most people end up with a small one page website that lists agencies. A lot of the non-profits really don't seem to help. I know of too many that just exploit the needy, with a 501C3 that is just around to because the founder needed a job. A lot have a one person making a good living, a bunch of under paid employees/volunteers, and a dubious mission statement. You find yourself thinking, "What do they do? I seems like all they do is write for grant money. Why is only one person in this organization getting a livable wage?" I got off track on the non-profits, sorry. If you are pyhsically, or mentally disabled; there's SSDI (if you worked in the past), and the threshold to qualify is pretty steep. Basifically, if you can lift a shovel--you don't qualify. If you have a psychiatric disorder, it's a bitch. The disability doctors do a horrid job deciding who should receive help. This is one huge problem. I don't know how to fix it. Determining the severity of a mental illness is still a huge Art. There are biased disability Doctor. I had a friend collecting SSDI, and the doctor told him, "Don't come back to this hospital for any help. The other doctors aren't as sympathetic as myself." This was my best friend. He was very excentric, but had a huge heart. I couldn't imagine him holding down any job. I used to hire him for side jobs, but it was only because I wanted him around, and knew he needed money. He was useless at job sites. I can't imagine him doing anything. Applying for medi-cal. It's not as bad as it used to be because of Obamacare. That's all I can say right now. One area that needs improvement is the way they pay for medication. They only give a person a months supply of a drug. Instead of going to a boutique pharmacy, and getting the medication for free; I gave found it more cost effective to just pay out of pocket at Costco. I buy 90 day supplies. Food stamps. It was horrid for awhile. Bill Clinton decided to get cute, and put time limits/restraints of receiving food stamps. Yea--that liberal guy. Obama took away the time limits. It's still very degrading. People on food stamps don't know what to buy sometimes. I recall a lady being told at a checkout she couldn't buy orange juice. It had to be concentrated. She said, but the concentrated is twice to price, and I get more in the container? Another time, a mother was told she couldn't buy cake mix, for her daughter birthday. The check out guy said, "You have to buy flour, butter, salt--sugar--whatever separately--miss. I didn't write the crazy rules--miss." The women just put her head down, took her daughters hand, and quietly left Safeway. Problems I see in the food stamp program. Make it less degrading. I don't see the need for a physical interview by a county worker--with that fake smile. Eligibility could be determined electronically. (One county worker once told me they make these programs intentionally difficult to apply to. They do it on purpose.) Section 8 housing. There's just not enough apartments. People who got on the waiting list, and got a place are Very lucky. The housing units have a lot of restrictions, a lot of petty restrictions. They basically tell people how to live, in a 47 page lease, at least in Marin County. (The county doesn't have it online--yes--they don't want it out there). I have a copy. One day, I will scan, and post the lease. It will look like these people were living in 50's Russia. Half of the restrictions are laugh out lot ridiculous. I'm getting tired of writing. These problems are hard to solve, but we need people like you who want to make it better. I am thinking about a website that is geared towards the homeless, for a few years now, but procrastinating. I don't just want to list agencies. I do know this, white males don't know much about the programs we have. Part of their ignorance is pride. Part of it is there is no real help. Part is they have just given up. Part of the problem is they have just given up. I had to repeat that because that's what I'm seeing. Maybe if we helped them before they spent years homless--they might have more inititative to try? There's a saying on the streets, it goes like this, "Homeless for a year, homeless for life!" In my county, we basically have one place for the homeless to get out of the elements, very important during the winter months. It is geared more for women, and it's always filled. We have some churches that let a a few homless spend the night on their property during certain winter months. The neighbors are constantly complaining. It's fear, and NIMBY's. There hasen't been one arrest that I'm aware of. I am now depressed. I know two guys whom are homeless. Both said the same thing. "All I want is a legal place to pitch a tent, and have access to a outhouse." There's nowhere to sleep for these people--legally. No county land--nothing. They are all technically breaking the law when they crawl in that Scotch broom thicket. The cops do give them tickets. And the cycle starts. They can't pay the tickets, and blah, blah blah. We complain because they are in the parks, or sleeping on the sidewalk, but where exactly are they suppose to go? We need to streamline the other programs, but we have an emergency right now. I went on a rant--sorry. I too think about the poor, and homeless daily. I know I could easily be one of them--in the bat of an eye.

khuknows 10y ago

> Part of the problem is they aren't tech savvy the way the HN community is - so what works for our community doesn't exactly work for theirs, or that they even use technology to the extent that we do (i.e. does technology even solve this problem?). > The other problem is revenue/profitability...this population is inherently cash-strapped, so trying to create a technology solution that likely lies in the Tech-meets-Consumer Discretionary industry, well, who among these people can (and will) afford such services? Maybe we should be looking at a different "group" as the users of the services we could provide. For example, the government. Governments spend billions on social services, so perhaps we could be creating technology that could improve their efficiency and reduce their costs, which in theory would lead to more/better support for undeserved communities. Not saying that's much easier, but it's another way we can try help.