Charities create community for marginalized people, through one-on-one outreach, holding community kitchens, operating thrift stores or bicycle repair shops, or

Charities create community for marginalized people, through one-on-one outreach, holding community kitchens, operating thrift stores or bicycle repair shops, or operating shelters or supportive housing. We discover how people survive with creativity and difficulty when they are "alternatively economied", and we create connections between people to keep them alive and offer them hope. We use I.T. including software much as any other paper-pushing corporate entity, except: paying for software and its care and feeding takes food out of mouths, so we don't like to do that if we don't have to, and; we don't have much use for the software intrigues that pass for productivity and wealth creation. Software pain points are bad for everybody, but some have training junkets, and some do not. Things like: performative or intrusive licensing asks; yet another cloud account; mandatory UIs with no equivalent API/CLI; layers of awkward cruft papering over legacy functionality that should have been discontinued decades ago (a certain backup package comes to mind); gratuitous UI changes. These are nano-distractions, but they add up for orgs. and workers who don't have much in the tank to begin with. We do have some interesting proprietary needs. For instance, street-involved people often go under several different names: your average CMS might allow that with a plugin, but it's so niche it might not induce anyone to build it (or worse, we try ineptly ourselves). Password/account recovery workflows are absolutely torturous for people who are anxious, depressed, neurodivergent. I once tried to guide a man with anger issues to fix a copy and paste mistake; he gave up and stormed off and, as a result of missing a deadline, probably wound up in prison, with a decade of knock-on effects. We rely on Free software--we adore simple, functional, administer-able packages that don't distract or use dark patterns--so that is a way you could contribute to our industry. Another way would be advocacy: government asks us to use lots of software that marketing pushes relentlessly even as it sabotages its functionality, so drawing on your experience to make government aware they're captured would help immensely (we don't have the time or literacy, and we can't bite that hand).