A Nation of Need

A study recently came out that said that 60% of Americans can’t afford a decent standard of living. That is, 60% of Americans can’t afford things like basic leisure activities.

I read this and felt saddened by it, if not fully surprised. Things are tough for most families out there, and getting worse.

The Big Dark Bill will compound the problem. Food banks are expecting a surge in the hungry even as their own resources from government will be reduced. 42 million Americans are on SNAP, which you likely know of as Food Stamps.

One way that government benefits will change is that there will be more paperwork to fill out for many Americans. “We're building AI tools to help people navigate the forms and requirements to access benefits,” said Jimmy Chen, the founder and CEO of Propel, whom I interviewed on the podcast this week.

I have admired Propel for a long time. “We now have 5 million households using Propel, which given that many of those households include children we touch more than 10 million Americans a month,” Jimmy relates.

Jimmy grew up the child of immigrants in Kansas City. His family had some hardship growing up, but Jimmy excelled in school and got a full ride to Stanford. He started working at Facebook in the Bay Area, but that didn’t seem like the right fit. “I wanted to solve problems that affected a lot of ordinary people, like my family growing up.” So he moved to Brooklyn to join a fellowship program to solve problems that faced the poor.

“I interviewed a ton of people who were on SNAP and found out the only way for them to check their balance was to call a 1-800 number and put in their information. It was the kind of friction that makes everything more difficult, because you have to go through this process every time you went to the grocery store. So we found a way to pull the data and display it on an app. The app is free for users. We went to benefits offices and told people about it. As soon as we got a few thousand users they told other people, because it made their life easier and better. Pretty soon, we had hundreds of thousands of users. We then found other ways to help them, like reducing theft and making it easier for them to apply for jobs. Thousands of people have found jobs through Propel.”

Jimmy is humble about his journey, but he’s spent more than a decade building Propel and has learned a lot. “In my opinion, people talk about the laws and the policy, but then they ignore the implementation and experience. Poor people deal with a lot. Imagine if everything that the government did worked as well as a banking app, and the forms were easy or filled out for you. Americans would have a lot more confidence in government’s ability to solve problems.” He’s right about that.

It reminds me of the goals of the Abundance movement, which is largely about reducing red tape so the government can deliver on its promise.

What blows me away about Propel is that they’ve done this much good without really getting a ton of buy-in from government. “Trying to get a contract with the federal government seemed like it would be time-consuming and arduous, so we figured let’s just try to solve a problem for people and if we make it good enough, users will find us.”

Imagine if Jimmy and Propel were not just helping people navigate through food stamps but also healthcare and retirement benefits? “We would honestly do it for free. I mean, we’re not charging anyone now and we’ve built a profitable business because we’re touching so many people’s lives and there’s so much inefficiency. We’d save governments millions, even billions.” Still, originally Jimmy had to overcome a lot of skepticism from investors. “They hadn’t had much direct experience with this, so they had a hard time reaching conviction. Eventually we found investors who actually understood the benefits system and how many people it affects.”

I asked Jimmy what we could do to help Propel grow. “Obviously, if you know someone who’s using food stamps, send them our way so we can help make their lives better. We’d like to start working with individual states on their programs too. We’d save them all money - we are just scratching the surface of what we can do.”

If you know me, you know that poverty is the problem I want to see solved the most. I’m working on improving our political system, but we know that’s a long-term approach that’s going to have fits and starts. Jimmy didn’t wait, and millions of people are better off for it today. It’s the kind of approach that deserves a lot more attention, because we might be able to improve people’s lives without waiting for D.C.

For my interview with Jimmy, click here. To see what Forward is doing in your state, click here. We will be launching something soon that we hope eventually makes as big a difference as Propel – it’s a very high bar. Also, we are having an Offline Party on Thursday in LA so if you're available and in the area come join us!