Loss of income to pay rent, loss of employment, loss of food security. The COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak has changed our lives in immense ways, and for many the loss of security across the board became imminent.

In mid-March, I, along with the One Degree team began to work completely remotely in response to stay-at-home orders, with the question lingering in all our minds, “What can we do to help?”

The One Degree team came together to brainstorm and plan a response, leading to the creation of a dynamic resource guide for those affected by COVID-19 in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County.

A few months have passed and One Degree continues to carry out our mission, and center our community, by mobilizing to improve our resource guide. I’m excited to share with you the next development in our COVID-19 response. With the help of over 20 volunteers we transferred our Resource Guide into a series of Collections on One Degree. You can think of a Collection, as a digital resource binder (here’s an example).

Evolving the Resource Guide into Resource Collections provides the community with an improved experience on our platform — it’s the ideal next step. Here’s why:
Community members can now:

• save a resource using their One Degree account
• track their progress towards accessing a resource in their My Plan section

Service providers can now:

• use our Referrals tool to send resources to clients/patients directly
• check in on clients/patients status to accessing resources

These are all features and tools that our community already has access to when searching for resources on One Degree, and we are thrilled to bring them to our COVID-19 resources.

Evolution of the COVID-19 Resource Guide to Collections

The first phase of our COVID-19 resource guide lived in a Google document that we updated daily with resource listings focused on food support, financial support, and childcare support (three of the most urgent needs identified early on in the outbreak), for all nine counties in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County. Community members and partners in the social service sector also started sending us resource information. We quickly realized that we needed to dedicate some of our team members exclusively to this important project, and so we shifted One Degree’s Resource Management department to support our commitment to updating new resource information everyday.

We also realized that we couldn’t do it alone! We received over 100 volunteer applications since March and over 40 volunteers contributed to the first COVID-19 resource guide.

Partnerships with other social service organizations and community groups sharing other guides with us led to the addition of hundreds of resources. We were so thrilled with the incredible amount of support we received. This growth, the expanding collaboration, and the number of people using the guide made us realize that our processes and delivery mechanism needed to change.

The next phase of the Resource Guide offered a mobile-friendly website using an off-the-shelf system that One Degree’s UI/UX Designer quickly customized and made beautiful. We continued to maintain our web pages, adding more and more resources daily. As incredible and comprehensive as this site was, our resource guide became long lists of resources and scrolling through them was challenging. Also, our community didn’t have the ability to save resource information for reference later.

To address these issues, in early May, we set our plan in motion to transfer our COVID-19 Resource Guide into a series of Collections on One Degree. With the support of our volunteer team, resources were transferred to the One Degree platform using the Resource Editing Tool and we were able to make the transition. Our COVID-19 Resource Guide evolution was made possible by volunteers, and we couldn’t be more thankful.

COVID-19 Resource Guide Collaborators

Cal State Los Angeles MPH students. At the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak, a group of Master’s of Public Health students at Cal State Los Angeles created an extensive Google Document, “COVID-19 Los Angeles Mass Resource List,” to address the urgent need to create one site where those in need could find essential community resources. One Degree collaborated with them to grow our LA County resource gathering. We are extremely grateful for their support and contribution. Thank you, Joyce Paraico, Jamila Cervantes, and Xugo Lujan Jr.! (Pictured below)

Xugo also shared some words with One Degree on our collaboration:

I attached a picture of my grandmother and myself. The reason for my investment in identifying resources is to ensure that the most vulnerable, like my grandmother, have the ability to stay safe and healthy. One step is to remove barriers to knowledge of resources. Thank you to everyone at One Degree. You all provide an immeasurable support to folks statewide.

Los Angeles Department of Health Services (LADHS). Our partners at LADHS generously offered some of their team members to work on our LA resources for the guide. Six LADHS staff members joined One Degree’s COVID-19 response by adding resources. Thank you, Stephanie Stone, Angelica Aviles, Lourdes “Ninette” Polanco-Aguilar, Reynaldo Garcia, Jeannette Johnson, and Arieneh Shahverdian!

Volunteers

We are humbled by the number of people who have come forward to support this effort. We would never have been able to offer this resource to the community without their support and dedication. Below are profiles of a few of our amazing volunteers. We love you all!

Zainab Ebrahimi (pictured below) is a Chilean-Iranian software engineer based in Brooklyn, NY. In her spare time she volunteers as a computer science teacher for Code Nation. Zainab is a Spanish translation volunteer for our COVID-19 resource guide.

Here’s what Zainab has to say about her volunteer work:

When the pandemic hit the US, I felt a responsibility to contribute however I could to help the people being affected the most. I’m grateful I found One Degree and that they needed someone who was able to translate to Spanish. It makes me happy to know we are able to serve the Spanish speaking community and allow them access to important resources that can help them navigate the COVID-19 crisis.

Eric Joshua Garcia (not pictured) is from Maryland and graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2019. He is currently working as a research fellow and, during his free time, he loves cooking, hiking, and photography.

Eric also shared some words with us about his volunteer experience:

Atthe beginning of this pandemic, I immediately began to think of ways I could help (from a safe, social distance). After searching through various virtual opportunities, I came across One Degree’s volunteer page. I was struck by their mission to help people adversely affected by the pandemic and immediately applied to become a COVID-19 resource volunteer. I quickly grew to love the experience since I knew the work we were doing could positively impact someone’s life during their time of need. It truly changed my perspective to see the numerous resources and the outpouring of support from individuals and organizations across California and the rest of the nation.

Dzifa Amexo (pictured below) is a senior at Mercy College studying finance and data analytics. She is currently living in New Jersey with her family and during the school year she lives in Dobbs Ferry, New York. During her free time Dzifa enjoys volunteering, karaoke, data visualization, and traveling.

Dzifa also had some words on her experience as a data volunteer:

I’ve always been driven to volunteer and give back in any way that I can from a young age. My mission is to leave this earth better than I inhabited it and so I strive to make an impact one person at a time. Knowing that if you pay it forward, hopefully, the circle of generosity will continue. Once my semester was made completely online due to COVID-19, I had a lot of free time being back at home. I thought to myself “how can I help” (well from my computer screen) and came across One Degree as a virtual opportunity. I was inspired to start because of the mission, which is focused on empowerment.

Mauricio Sepulveda (pictured below) is from Chile and has been living in New York for a little over a year. He came to live in the United States because of a job opportunity for his wife and stopped working as an Industrial Engineer in a bank in Chile, he now calls New York home.

Here’s how Mauricio describes his volunteer work as a Spanish translator volunteer:

Iliked the option of starting to work as a volunteer [with One Degree] since this would help me improve my language, expand my network, and mainly support the Latino community that does not understand English. I have always valued the people who work as volunteers, and I believe that it is part of being an integral professional to be able to dedicate time to help those who need it. Thank you very much for accepting me, so that I can contribute in times of crisis, and when the world needs us more united.

In closing

As One Degree’s Resource Coordinator it has been an unbelievable experience to spearhead our COVID-19 Resource Guide efforts and response. I am amazed at the enormous support we received from the One Degree team, partners and volunteers. It has been incredible to work with so many people motivated to lend a helping hand during a time of crisis. I look forward to continuing our COVID-19 resource guide work for the community!

Questions about our work? Need help finding resources? Contact us at help@1degree.org.

Originally published at About One Degree.

Everything We Do Is in Service to People First: The Development One Degree’s COVID-19 Response was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed the public discourse around social care equity and access. Laying bare disparities between low income communities of color and their whiter, wealthier counterparts, it also underscored how social and cultural understanding — or lack thereof — can determine the level of trust between communities and healthcare providers. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, for example, the need for “credible messengers” to share COVID-19 information prompted government and healthcare agencies to lean on community-informed ambassadors to reach those most at-risk.

The pandemic affirmed what community leaders have known for decades — the messenger is as crucial as the message itself.

Today’s social and economic landscape makes this message ever more urgent. Increasing numbers of people struggling with unemployment, housing insecurity, and mental health conditions need not just a stronger social care system, but a more credible system, with community-informed workers at the frontlines.

We are excited to see new policy and budget initiatives, like CalAIM and increased Medi-Cal spending, emerge during this recovery phase. The support and direction they provide for equitable and person-centered care are much needed for our California communities. At the same time, we are concerned that qualities central to reaching at-risk individuals and families — lived experience and community ties — are not yet central to how social care policy evolves.

As a whole, CalAIM recognizes social work and community support as central to comprehensive care. Echoing this message, the Washington Post has described social workers as the “unsung heroes of the pandemic” and fundamental to the care landscape:

“Within our hospitals, they evaluate the needs of families, enroll patients in public assistance programs and address food-insecurity and transportation challenges. Social workers are the glue to connect patients and families with essential services, the grease that lubricates key bureaucratic processes we and our loved ones depend on in our hours of need.”

However, a recent Cal Matters report on the CalAIM Behavioral Health Payment Reform Initiative raises concerns that some of CalAIM’s reforms, including higher payments for providers with advanced degrees, value professional credentials over lived experience and community knowledge. Despite evidence that lived experience increases the efficacy and engagement of behavioral health services, this CalAIM initiative overlooks its value and, therefore, comes with barriers to equity attached.

We share this concern and worry about any vision for social care that does not uplift the experience and knowledge of people who have used safety net resources. In One Degree’s field — social care technology — services are increasingly being delivered by highly funded, for-profit corporations. Unfortunately, when profit margins and ROI drive how such technology develops, the needs and expertise of communities are often devalued.

This is where One Degree stands out. As a nonprofit, we remain beholden to the public good. More importantly, our Community Outreach & Engagement team is staffed by people who have used public services and are local to the regions they serve. Having directly helped 1,400 community members navigate One Degree resources, they continually demonstrate that frontline staff with lived experience are necessary to building dignified communities of care. For many of our community members, our approach offers the relief of feeling seen and supported by those who understand the journey.

To implement our values more fully, we are designing a new volunteer initiative to recruit, train and certify Community Outreach & Resource Navigators — with lived experience — to connect their communities to resources. Integrating leadership development with resource navigation training, the initiative aims to elevate the voices, resilience and power of low income communities. For us, this is a necessary next step towards bridging the gap between the social care system and the diverse communities it serves.

The messenger is as crucial as the message itself.

As social care policies and tech infrastructure develop, we need more and more organizations advocating for what we know: that community experts can reach those that others can’t. If we rally behind this truth, the unsung hero of social care — lived experience — will begin to receive the valuation our communities deserve.

Originally published at About One Degree.

Lived Experience: The Unsung Hero of Social Care was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Aptly named “The Land of Enchantment,” New Mexico is known for its beautiful landscapes, from the Chihuahuan Desert to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the High Plains in the east. The state’s rich cultural and demographic diversity also captivates: with a population of 2.1 million — 50.2% of whom are Latino or Hispanic — and home to 23 federally recognized tribes, New Mexico ranks among the most diverse states in the U.S.

At the same time, New Mexico’s cultural and physical landscapes intertwine with economic and healthcare disparities that affect hundreds of thousands of New Mexicans: 25% of the population lives at or below the federal poverty level and 43% are enrolled in Medicaid. The state also reports elevated rates of obesity, diabetes, and diseases of despair — including significant suicide and alcohol-related deaths. Furthermore, a third of the population resides in rural areas that consistently suffer from practitioner shortages, underscoring an urgent need for social care networks that meet the unique needs of rural communities.

A Rural Gateway to Resources for Children and Families

“Big city issues with small town resources” is how Dr. Brian Etheridge, a pediatrician who has worked in Grant County for sixteen years and most recently for six years at Hidalgo Medical Services (HMS), described the healthcare challenges in rural Southwestern New Mexico. During his tenure, he saw the health issues his patients and their families faced grow hand-in-hand with healthcare practitioner shortages. Notably, when Dr. Etheridge arrived in Silver City, he was just one of four pediatricians serving all of Grant County; a decade and a half later, he was the last. Issues related to social determinants of health, such as substance abuse, poverty, and lack of access to care and transportation, have skyrocketed during the past several years.

It was these obstacles that compelled One Degree to partner with HMS to expand access to vital resources in the community. In 2020, One Degree Southwest New Mexico was born.

The impetus for the project arose from a series of conversations initiated by Dr. Etheridge and Alicia Edwards, the Coordinator for Healthy Kids Healthy Communities Grant County and Grant County Commissioner. Wanting to bridge the gaps between healthcare practitioners and those addressing the social determinants affecting health in the community, they convened a series of multidisciplinary meetings that included a range of healthcare providers, therapists, childcare providers, and community partners.

From these conversations, a central theme emerged: the lack of access to resources for both families and providers. Reflecting on these discussions in a presentation to the state’s Legislative Health & Human Services Committee, Ms. Edwards stated, “It is a constant and unending struggle for families and providers to find resources — there are never enough resources, we cannot access the existing resources, and it is very difficult to navigate the existing system.”

Equipped with a shared understanding of the problem, the group sought to create a comprehensive resource guide, transitioning from an outdated paper-based system to a digital platform accessible to both families and practitioners. With a leadership grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dr. Etheridge and HMS introduced One Degree’s public, community-resource platform to Southwest New Mexico.

In this region, many residents lack broadband access, but cell phone usage is prevalent. This made One Degree’s mobile-friendly platform an attractive choice for connecting individuals to housing, food, and other basic needs services. The technology’s ease of use and ability to send resources directly to clients’ phones also made it a valuable tool in bridging access gaps in the community. Additionally, One Degree incorporated local as well as state and national-level resources and provided a dynamic, regularly updated database that could be improved and refined based on community feedback.

One Degree’s Impact in New Mexico

Since 2021, One Degree has served 21,290 users in various locations, from rural counties like Grant, Catron, and Hidalgo to the metro areas of Albuquerque and Santa Fe. By providing access to over 500 local resources, the platform supports both front-line workers and community members in finding critical services and benefits for all age groups.

This extensive reach — especially the ability to bridge service and public health gaps in rural zones — is directly linked to One Degree’s mission and capacity as a nonprofit provider. While community care technology has immense potential to bridge resource gaps, privatized solutions often proliferate in densely populated areas where higher usage and funding yield larger revenue streams and profits.

Furthermore, federal and state-mandated initiatives often fail to incorporate the input of community members and community-informed providers in rural areas.

“We believe that trust and sustainability are critical to social net infrastructure,” said One Degree CEO Rey Faustino. “If social care technology goes unused due to misalignment with cultural and community needs, impact, trust and funding can be lost. Partnering with those who deeply understand the community allows us to remain adaptable, and by promoting open access to our resource technology, we create an essential feedback loop between us, community members, and providers that enhances the platform, expands its reach and solidifies One Degree as a definitive public good.”

Dr. Etheridge also emphasizes the advantages of the One Degree approach. “One Degree is the only system I’ve seen where you can easily get information in front of patients and their families. This is crucial, especially in rural areas where people know each other and hesitate to engage neighbors or relatives for their health and social needs. What’s remarkable about One Degree is that it allows us to present information informally. I frequently found myself providing WIC and childcare resources right from the platform. My patients didn’t have to engage with community health workers or care coordinators first to access this resource; it was readily available. And, in cases where families needed to be walked through using the platform, I’d often just talk about it, print something from the site, and they’d take the info and run with it. It’s impressive how quickly this can happen during a clinical visit.”

Top 15 Searches on One Degree Southwest New Mexico (as of September 2023)

The search data of One Degree platform continually provides feedback about the evolving needs of New Mexico’s communities. With 6,575 searches revealing diverse and interconnected needs that no single organization can meet, One Degree data — gathered directly from the public’s independent access to the platform — not only gives visibility to the complexity of community needs, but also underscores the platform’s pivotal role in effectively responding to and addressing them.

A Beacon for the Future: Open Care Networks

Despite the positive strides made by dedicated healthcare providers like Dr. Etheridge, the regionally delivered services of HMS, and the relentless efforts of community providers supporting families daily, significant hurdles to accessing safety net resources persist both in New Mexico and nationwide. One Degree Southwest New Mexico is just one step among many necessary to expand and fortify opportunities for rural communities.

Nevertheless, One Degree sees its regional platform as a beacon — a compelling demonstration of how collaborative, cross-sector partnerships can effectively bridge service gaps by responding to communities at the local level. The platform also highlights how important it is for safety net technologies, which are often publicly funded, to engage directly with both those providing vital services and those using them. When community-resource platforms are open and accessible in this way, it empowers entire networks of care to grow, learn, and succeed collectively. With this approach, One Degree strives to ensure that safety net technology genuinely serves the public and delivers what communities need.

Originally published at About One Degree.

One Degree of Change: Transforming Resource Accessibility in Rural New Mexico was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yesterday was Transgender Day of Remembrance. In the last year, we lost 32 lives in the transgender community due to violence. As if that weren’t enough, we woke up yesterday to another mass shooting, this time at an LGBTQ bar in #ColoradoSprings.

Nothing can make sense of that violence, and I’m still reeling and seething from it myself.

And, in my anger and grief, I remind myself of how important it is to collectively support our vulnerable community members.

At One Degree, our mission is to support low-income and at-risk individuals and families. And the #LGBTQ community includes some of the most vulnerable populations. According to the Trevor Project, “28% of LGBTQ youth reported experiencing homelessness or housing instability at some point in their lives,” and that figure is higher for trans and non-binary youth, from 38–39%.

In solidarity and to honor our trans and non-binary friends, colleagues, and family members, I share a link to this GLAAD Reference Guide.

The more we speak to and educate the public about the issues facing our vulnerable community members, the more we can protect one another and, through action, declare that enough is enough.

https://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender

Transgender Day of Remembrance was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since my entrepreneurial journey with One Degree and my partnership journey with my husband are so deeply intertwined, these two anniversaries reminded me about how important it is to have a support network — how significant it is to know that someone has your back, like my husband has had mine for the last decade.

When I started One Degree in 2012, “social determinants of health” was hardly on the radar, but frontline workers at nonprofit, healthcare, and government agencies all knew there was a problem with the system because their clients were struggling to get even their basic needs met.

I experienced this first hand when I worked at the frontlines of an education nonprofit. Everyday, our students and families faced new challenges from food insecurity to homelessness. How could I expect my students to focus on SAT tutoring if they hadn’t eaten a meal that day?

So I started One Degree to provide a support network for our community — the way that my husband has supported me through the years. In fact, when we first met, I was couch-surfing at friends’ homes to make ends meet, and I wouldn’t have been able to make it through if it weren’t for their support.

One Degree Bay Area Accomplishments

And it’s amazing to think back over the last decade to see the support network that One Degree created in the Bay Area:

• We have over 10,000 pro members (nonprofit, healthcare, and government workers) in the Bay Area.
• Over 22% of organizations in the Bay Area have one or more staff members using and affiliated with One Degree.
• More than 1.5 million unique people have used One Degree to access 10,776 life-changing social services across the Bay Area’s nine counties.
• In the last few years, the number of unique people using One Degree Bay Area has grown 65% year-over-year.

We’re also partnering with a variety of initiatives throughout the Bay, like supporting adolescent development as part of the Mo’Magic program of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, working to prevent homelessness with the All Home coalition, and reimagining the role of information and referral systems (like 2–1–1’s) with the Connect Bay Area Network, which includes our friends at Health Leads, the United Way Bay Area, Eden I&R and Contra Costa Crisis Center, to name a few.

Building on a Foundation of Trust

Ten years later, I can easily say that we’ve achieved much of the early vision for One Degree. But just like my relationship with my partner has changed in the last decade, One Degree has to evolve to meet the moment.

Unlike the tech companies targeting the safety net, building technology on top of broken systems, and exploiting communities, One Degree starts by building a foundation of trust in the communities we serve and then working to identify and address the root causes of racism and poverty.

In the next 10 years, you will see more of our work on shifting power to low-income communities. Because we are a non-profit startup led by people who have both used and worked in social services, we are committed to not only making services simpler to find, but reshaping the industry to be more equitable and dignified for the people who need it most.

Special thanks to all of the amazing supporters who have helped us create something special for our communities over the last decade.

Happy Anniversary, One Degree community!

Happy 10 Years, One Degree! was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Connecting Dreams and Aspirations to Services and Programs

The Fair Futures NYC program model serves young people who have been in the foster care system. The core of the Fair Futures model is a deep focus on the youths’ aspirations, strengths, and identity. It consists of a robust middle school program that prepares students for success in high school, and a long-term coaching program from 9th grade until age 26. The model includes 3,000+ young people served by 300+ staff in 26 nonprofits across five boroughs — no easy feat!

This deep focus on individual youth aspirations meant that Fair Futures staff and young people needed the ability to explore the academic and career resources, programs, and services available in NYC.

Shouldn’t This be Searchable?

I was assigned the task of collecting and organizing all the relevant resources, programs, and services. During this process, I found important resource information offered in different locations. For example, while two different print manuals were available from two different organizations, a third organization tracked this information in a set of four Excel spreadsheets and two PDF documents. A fourth organization employed a consultant to update its list annually.

And each of them had unique resources that were critical to the success of Fair Futures!

I’ve seen this everywhere I’ve worked. From Chicago to Washington, D.C. to New York City, incredible teams of people come together to fund, build, and deliver innovative programs and services to help their communities. And in each of these places, the same questions were asked: Which organization provides what programs? Who can apply? How? Where? Shouldn’t this be searchable?

Equal and Easy Access for All

At Fair Futures, we quickly realized that an online directory was needed. A one-stop shop with all available resources and related critical information would help ensure everyone had equal and easy access to all the rich academic and career opportunities that NYC has to offer.

After initially exploring a custom-built directory, we realized that Fair Futures wouldn’t have the expertise and capacity to maintain a software platform and all of the resource information. So, the team started looking for an existing tool that could be customized for Fair Futures and NYC, and found the right partner in One Degree, by Alluma.

One Degree can be accessed on almost any device via desktop and mobile website browsers, iPhone and Android mobile apps, and text-to-search. Resources included in the One Degree database are updated at least every six months, and all resources are easily printed and shared by Fair Futures coaches and specialists.

The Results

One Degree + Fair Futures NYC launched in 2020 with a set of 470 high-quality internship, job readiness, and vocational/sector-based training programs. Later that year, The City University of New York (CUNY) reached out to Fair Futures, became an official partner, and the One Degree Resource Management team added 300 CUNY certificate programs. In spring 2021, several hundred more CUNY internship and upskilling programs were added. In total, nearly 1,500 searchable academic and career opportunities for young people are now available on One Degree!

The Fair Futures + One Degree partnership has been a huge success. Fair Futures gets to focus on the aspirations of young people, CUNY gets to focus on providing a first-rate public education, and One Degree handles operating, maintaining, and updating the directory and resources information that helps turn aspirations into reality.

Shouldn’t This be Searchable? was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every so often, I get invited to speak on panels about our work, and I usually find myself being the odd person out. The panelists that I’m speaking alongside are usually operating from a completely different context than our world at Alluma, where we are used to working in partnership with our communities. I recently joined a panel organized by the Los Angeles Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) coalition, and, once again, had this same experience. My co-panelists were the other main “vendors” of social referral tools in Los Angeles: founders and leaders at Unite Us, Aunt Bertha, and NowPow.

Reflecting back on the experience, I wanted to take some time to share my thoughts, paint the picture, and create the context that is necessary if we, as a community, intend to address social determinants of health. In my opinion, social determinants of health are really just coded language for addressing race equity. Here are four lessons from my experience.

1. For-profit companies are not incentivized to collaborate, and this leads to failure

When I got the briefing for this event, I learned that the group wanted to dig into the pain points that health care systems are facing with the implementations of referral tools including: interoperability, collaboration among vendors, data standardization, and roles and responsibilities between vendors and clients.

While I think these issues are relevant, I challenged the group to see the bigger picture: Are we building and perpetuating systems of oppression that continue to exploit communities of color, immigrant communities, and low-income communities?

I explained that healthcare institutions are using broken procurement processes to invest in technology systems that have major impacts on the community without using an equity lens. The for-profit companies that they are investing millions of dollars in are also built on a corporate structure that prioritizes profits for shareholders over long-term improvement and the well-being of the community.

Ultimately, the profit motive means the system doesn’t work for those who need it. There’s fragmentation in the space as demonstrated by the very panel itself, where four different social referral platforms are operating within multiple systems in Los Angeles County. There’s fragmentation among community-based organizations (CBOs) — and then you add the layer of confusion with health systems asking those CBOs to use multiple referral platforms (without adequate incentives).

This system is failing because the for-profit companies in this space do not have the incentive to collaborate and build a better system together. In fact, their corporate structure incentivizes them to NOT collaborate with others, which is why, after almost a decade of working in this space, none of these companies can point to meaningful collaborations amongst their peers. While we continue to be invited to speak on panels, the for-profit companies continue spouting off the same scripted marketing language.

My main point during this panel was that in order to truly build equitable solutions that create health and well-being for our communities, we need to intentionally center our work on racial equity, not on profits. Centering the work on race equity also means building not just “for people” but also with and by the people, who may be open to screening for social needs but have no expectation that a provider will solve their social needs problems.

2. The dominant white lens means these companies completely miss the point

Meanwhile, we’re all still going through a pandemic that completely upended the healthcare industry, killed over 500,000 people, and disproportionately killed black and brown people, and Filipino-American nurses.

Which is why I do not have the patience to stand by and listen to empty promises and meaningless marketing jargon from companies that talk about their work as if it’s just another day at the office. For me, there’s a real, visceral, personal urgency to fix this problem because my communities are being decimated and are dying. So when we have the CEOs and founders of the leading social referral platforms in a panel together and the primary themes put on the table are data standardization and interoperability, please excuse me while I wave my red flag. How can we go through an international crisis that is continuing to gut-punch the healthcare industry, yet still be unable to talk about the real problem of race equity? This is the white dominant lens at play.

3. These companies profit by taking advantage of misconceptions

The companies that are exploiting the market and profiting off of the pain of our communities are taking advantage of some misconceptions that emerge in the healthcare industry as a result of the white dominant lens.

Misconception #1: “The experts will create the right standards”

One thing that all of the panelists agreed on is that the technical problems are actually all solvable. All of the technical solutions we provide are similarly specced. Problems like standardization of terminology and developing interoperability have all been solved in other industries and can be done in ours.

However, there’s an assumption that the standards that a group of for-profit companies creates are going to be the right standards for our communities. And yet, big tech and social media companies show us what happens when you leave the development of standards to for-profit companies unchecked and without accountability. Just look at the problematic data and privacy concerns that social media companies are muddling through.

I would not and do not trust standards that this group of for-profit companies creates unless they specifically outline and pledge a commitment toward racial equity. Beyond that, we fall into a similar problem of trusting that because they’re “experts” in the field, they’ll know what’s best for our communities. In fact, our communities know what’s best for their communities. And any standards created that will affect the community should have involvement from community representatives.

Furthermore, I actually think that the conversation around data standardization and interoperability is a red herring. As I mentioned, we know this is a solvable problem, but the challenge is that there is no incentive in the for-profit corporate structure to invest time and resources in co-developing standards. For-profit companies simply don’t have the financial incentive to do this.

Meanwhile, the bigger challenge that we need to address is investing in nonprofit organizations that can act as intermediaries that incentivize and get the for-profit companies to agree to centering their work around race equity, rather than referrals.

Misconception #2: “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

I know that the work of systems change can feel daunting. If you’re one person working in one community benefits department, how do you dismantle white supremacy in the beast that is the healthcare industry?

But I reminded this audience of healthcare professionals that they have more power than they think they do. The coalition building they are doing together is a great start to grow more power. The fact that this loose coalition was created organically to think critically about major implementation challenges in the referrals platform space is a signal to me that the space is beginning to mature.

I recommended to the audience that we need to broaden the coalition to include nonprofit organizations that serve our community as well as the nonprofit and for-profit organizations that are delivering the referral platforms.

With a broad, multi-sector coalition, we can co-create shared goals that help us address the main challenges of race equity and health equity. And co-creating these goals with for-profit stakeholders will help hold them accountable to other metrics beyond profit for shareholders.

These kinds of collective impact models have been successfully implemented throughout the country in the education sector and are a viable option for the healthcare space.

Misconception #3: “Race equity and problems with capitalism are just philosophical musings.”

One of the panelists tried to dismiss my emphasis on race equity by saying that it was just “philosophical musing.” At first I was offended, but remembered that a common tactic of white supremacy is downplaying the voices of people of color. This is how they steamroll a group into their white dominant perspective.

I can understand that for this white male CEO, who started his company because he wanted to do good and make money while doing it, this particular context is challenging. It challenges the very incentive structure that has resources coming to his company. And I can see why someone would believe that my call to center our work on race equity was just “philosophical musing” if they have never been at the blunt end of the penalties of this incentive structure.

While it might sound like philosophical flight of fancy to some, questioning the systems that we’re operating under is a necessary step in creating justice for people who have been left out of care. Just like the criminal justice system is facing a reckoning with its inherently racist structures, the healthcare system has to be held accountable for its own part in perpetuating cycles of racial oppression. We see this every day during the pandemic as people of color are disproportionately getting sick and dying.

I mentioned on the panel that I’m not disparaging their for-profit companies, and this is not a judgment on capitalism. This is a reality check on us for relying on capitalism to save the day. Capitalism is not going to save us.

4. We must center our work on race equity

I think the audience and panelists are seeing that all of the panelists (Alluma included) share a lot of similarities in the technology that we’re providing. The key difference is that we, at Alluma, have a very clear community-based point of view on how to affect change. We must center our work on race equity. Otherwise we risk perpetuating the systems of oppression that are currently hurting our communities.

In contrast the for-profit companies also have a strong point of view on the work, and it’s a very strong perspective around scale, market domination, and profit for shareholders. We can’t wait for the for-profit vendors to provide the systems change that we need because they’re not incentivized to center their work on race equity. It’s up to us to create the counter-narrative, a perspective that is based on the voices of the people and communities that we serve.

People Over Profit: Four Lessons from a Panel With For-profit Competitors was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After I aged out of Wayne County foster care at 18, I fell on some pretty hard times. I was sleeping in an abandoned apartment near the Lafayette Towers, hungry, overwhelmed, and clueless that I could or should look for help.

Instead, I relied on word of mouth. I heard Plaka’s Coney Island in Greektown was hiring, so I asked for a job and started working the midnight shift. I heard the Unitarian church gave away free clothing, so I stopped by and got some work clothes. I heard there was a free clinic out in Washtenaw County, so I went there for my gynecological appointments and gave them a fake address.

In fact, I started attending Wayne State University as a 22-year-old only because another waitress told me in passing that registration was open. I told her I didn’t think I was allowed to register. She whipped her head around, arched one of her eyebrows (which let me know she thought I was crazy!), and walked me into the registrar’s building on the corner of Warren and Woodward. A week later, I was sitting in class. Four years later, I graduated with honors, a double major, and a 3.9 GPA.

Thankfully, things have changed. Not the need, of course; at some point in most of our lives, we will need support. Now Alluma’s resource and referral platform One Degree has changed how Detroiters can find the help they need, when they need it.

This month, One Degree launched in Detroit. Through community partnerships with the Live6 Alliance and the Marygrove Conservancy, residents in Northwest Detroit neighborhoods are now able to access a directory of Detroit resources and support services — from housing to healthcare to job training — on their phones, laptops, and desktop computers. For folks who are more comfortable with texting, One Degree offers text-to-search. Try it out by texting what you or a community member needs to 844–833–1334 and include the Northwest Detroit zip code 48221.

These community partnerships are critical to how One Degree works to move people out of poverty. The Live6 Alliance has led a number of innovative, grassroots projects, including building a yard sign campaign and creating an engagement kit campaign with the local block club presidents. The Marygrove Conservancy has connected One Degree to their workforce development efforts, and will soon provide One Degree training to their tenant community. And my role as Director of New Markets — One Degree at Alluma has been to say yes to, and provide support for, all these brilliant community ideas. Community building is at the heart of our work.

I wish One Degree had been around when I was in my greatest time of need (trust me when I say I am a morning person and the midnight shift was not for me!). And I’m beyond proud to be a part of the team that helped bring One Degree to Detroit.

Over the next few years, I’ll be here supporting the Live6 Alliance and the Marygrove Conservancy communities, partnering with others to expand One Degree into more Detroit neighborhoods, and doing whatever it takes to empower Detroiters to use One Degree to create a path out of poverty for themselves and for their communities. Please reach out if you have any ideas or are inspired to collaborate. I’m here to help.

Aisha joined One Degree as the Director of New Markets in 2021 because she believes the social safety net should provide accessible and dignified services to anyone in need. Aisha is passionate about destigmatizing the experience of need and poverty, and grew up with the support of WIC, Medicaid, food stamps, and free school lunch. She holds a Master’s Degree in Social Work from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Wayne State University.

One Degree Launches in Detroit, My Hometown was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear One Degree Community,

Today we are hurting as a team — and as human beings.

One Degree members are people creating a path out of poverty for themselves and their community. Black members, who make up a significant portion of our community, continue to face murder at the hands of law enforcement, and we cannot stay silent.

We’re usually sending you emails about product changes or text message reminders, or maybe we’re helping you find the resources you need over live chat. Behind those interactions with us — the One Degree team — are individuals who are angry and grieving, including some of us who have directly experienced the kind of ongoing trauma that, yet again, was brought to light this past week.

Black people — men, women, boys, girls, trans, and nonbinary individuals — across the country continue to face state-sanctioned murder, while the president has done little more than stoke anger and encourage violence, pushing for the vigilante shooting of people on our city streets. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are just two of the most recent names on a long list, which includes Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland — and which stretches back hundreds of years, long before the founding of our nation.

While the stories are painfully familiar, today’s moment is different. Only in the last few years has the systemic injustice perpetrated on Black Americans been able to be so quickly captured on video and beamed around the world, making it real and undeniable for so many who could before claim ignorance. And now it is happening amidst a global pandemic and an economic depression, both of which disproportionately affect Black individuals and others who are marginalized. Tragically, none of this is surprising, because law enforcement violence, economic mobility, and health outcomes have long been intertwined.

We know none of this is new. And yet there are times when the pain, the anger, the grief, and the injustice is too much to bear, and we must pause to mourn. This is one of those times.

The One Degree community is built to serve the most marginalized among us. Beyond the day-to-day work we do — which we will keep doing — we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that we are more than our website and our mobile apps, more than the interactions you have with us over chat, and more than a team of people across the Internet.

This is a moment to remember each other’s humanity and to work toward a better future together. We stand with the Black Lives Matter movement and, while we call for an end to institutional racism, we will continue to do our part, including supporting you however we can.

In solidarity,

The One Degree Team: Rey, Eric, Lauren, Angel, Cecilia, Emma, Holly, Jessica, Marc, Sara, Shawn, Tayler, Tijana, Troy, Avery, and Jennifer

Black Lives Matter: One Degree on the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lauren has been with us since 2017 as our Senior Product Manager, leading our product development and advancing our technology to empower tens of thousands of low-income families. As of last month, she is now overseeing our entire programmatic team, which includes product development and also resource database management, marketing, community outreach, member support, partnerships and all the other work we do to serve our community.

Over the last seven years, One Degree has grown from the seed of an idea to a robust program, serving over 500,000 people across California and beyond. ( Read more about the stories and numbers behind our impact.) Unlike traditional for-profit tech companies, we operate on a tight budget, with a diverse and mission-driven team where everyone wears a lot of hats. I have been extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to lead the program team for over six years, and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together. It’s now time to expand the executive team to help us scale our impact.

I could not be more excited to see Lauren stepping up and continuing this work, bringing with her new ideas, a fresh perspective, deep leadership experience, and a wonderful sense of humor (always needed in the nonprofit world!). Previous to joining One Degree, Lauren held product development leadership positions for over 20 years at Pearson, a major global education technology company, where she led the development of products in higher education STEM disciplines that are in use by millions of students around the world. Lauren is an exceptional person who is deeply committed to serving our community.

With this leadership transition, I’ll still be here at One Degree, continuing in the role I took on last year as Chief Operating Officer. My work focuses on further developing our internal infrastructure and supporting our growth, while continuing to partner with One Degree’s CEO Rey Faustino to ensure the sustainability of the organization for years to come.

Congratulations to Lauren! I look forward to seeing her continue to make a major impact on our community in this new role.

In solidarity,

Eric Lukoff
Chief Operating Officer
One Degree

(Photo credit Compass Family Services.)

Growing our leadership team at One Degree was originally published in One Degree on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.