On the Ground

Dollar For (Vancouver, Washington · Portland metro area, USA)

LONG FEI — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 14:52:11 -0800

Dollar For is a US nonprofit with eighteen employees as registered on last year's tax return. It does one thing: it helps patients who can't pay their hospital bills get the relief the law already gives them. The basis is 501r, a provision written into the US tax code in 2010: a nonprofit hospital that wants to keep its tax exemption must have a written financial assistance policy, and must let patients know about it. According to the organization's nationwide database of hospital policies, the 2025 average was full waiver for households below 204% of the federal poverty line, and a discount below 322%.

Founder Jared Walker started out crowdfunding in Portland to pay medical bills for local families. After a lawyer asked him whether he had ever read 501r, he switched to getting the application process done for patients, and within a few months about $1 million of bills in the Portland area disappeared. In 2021 a 60-second explainer video he posted reached 35 million views, and today's model took shape from there: a database that compiles every US hospital's policy one by one, a six-question bilingual screener, a system that fills in the hospital's application form automatically, and a team that sends it, follows up and appeals.

According to its FY2025 Form 990, the organization spent $1.64 million in the year and got $55 million in medical debt relieved for patients that same year, a book value at hospital list prices. The figure on its website as of 5 October is $175 million relieved cumulatively and 55,776 applications filed. In June 2026, Dollar For was named to the second cohort of the OpenAI Foundation's People-First AI Fund. In FY2025 its revenue was $1.46 million, its first deficit; nearly 97% of its revenue comes from donations and grants.

the Alliance of Community Foundations of Mexico · Monterrey, Mexico

LONG FEI — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 18:04:52 -0700

Comunalia was formally founded in August 2011. Based in Monterrey, a city in northern Mexico, it links seventeen independent community foundations spread across sixteen states. Community foundations in Mexico have come a long way: the type of fund known as "fondos" first appeared in 1985, and in 1996 Fundación Comunitaria Oaxaca became the first institution founded under the name of a community foundation. In a guide the alliance published in 2016, the funders it thanked were the Inter-American Foundation, the Mott Foundation and the ADO Foundation.

The alliance does not run community projects itself; its work is to get its seventeen members to truly work together. First, shared indicators: as of December 2024, the members had granted over 1 billion pesos, 1,487 organizations had been strengthened and more than 880,000 people had benefited; 49% of the money went through 152 managed funds, 42% through 78 social investment funds and 9% through 69 member-run projects. Second, people: three communities of practice (13 foundations, 23 people, 27 meetings), 16 scholarships for 8 foundations, and 8 one-on-one technical consultancies for 5. Third, replicable templates: Signos Vitales, a community vital-signs diagnosis from Community Foundations of Canada (3 foundations published reports in 2024; 7 took part in the 2024–2025 fourth round), and Círculos de Dar, giving circles run with Philanthropy Together (four circles raised 172,450 pesos; with the alliance's 1:1 match the total reached 344,900 pesos, supporting 6 community projects).

92% of the members' funding comes from local donors. The alliance's own income in 2024 was 12 million pesos — 89% from institutional donations and 10% from membership dues. Its operating team has four people; a new executive director took office in 2024, in what the chair of the board called a transition phase to "reactivate our mission." At the regional level, the alliance takes part in CIAF, the Ibero-American learning community of community foundations, where support organizations from nine countries learn from one another.

Alliance for Public Health

LONG FEI — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:49:47 -0700

The Alliance for Public Health was founded on 1 December 2000, originally as an international technical assistance project supported by the United States Agency for International Development and the European Union. It started in Ukraine and now works across the whole of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For twenty-five years it has stayed with a small set of issues: HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and harm reduction for people who use drugs — not making abstinence a precondition, but bringing infections and deaths down first. By its own account, 250,000 people at highest risk of infection in Ukraine are reached with its prevention services every year, and together with partners it has averted 50,000 new infections.

Before teaching others to use AI, it built a few things of its own: TWIIN, a "virtual social worker" launched in 2024 — online 24 hours a day, free and anonymous, answering questions on HIV, tuberculosis, addiction and mental health, with every digital figure drawn from real social workers and community representatives; its 25th-anniversary materials say it has attracted over 10,000 users. It uses machine learning to support social network testing: data from 2024, published in October 2025, show a positivity rate of 5.6% in the machine-selected group against 4.3% in the staff-selected group. And its telemedicine platform Help24 had provided 127,192 services by October 2025.

The seven-session online course featured in this episode, "AI for NGOs," began on 19 June 2026. It is run by Social Equation Hub, a partner team within the Eastern Europe and Central Asia regional project led by APH, with APH as the supporting organization; funding comes from Help Space's blockchain-oriented community health initiative, supported by an international foundation, and from the regional project itself, funded by the Global Fund. The course's promise: each organization builds its own projects, knowledge bases and tools, and by the end it is "entirely theirs: their account, their setup, their rules." It uses the "4D" framework from an AI fluency course for nonprofits — Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence. Every exercise is done on the organization's own real documents, one session is devoted to data security and verifying outputs, and the "skills" it teaches are transferable and belong to the organization. Registered organizations can receive a two-month paid subscription, with a limited number of places.

May First Movement Technology (New York / Mexico City — movement technology cooperative)

LONG FEI — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:50:02 -0700

May First Movement Technology is a member-owned cooperative operating in New York and Mexico City. Members pay dues and get email, mailing lists, web hosting, document collaboration and video meetings; hosting isn't a product it sells but a benefit of membership. By its own account, more than 800 organizations entrust their digital infrastructure to it, and for over 20 years it has run that infrastructure without mining data or selling attention. Its roots go back to two alternative internet providers of the early 1990s, People Link in New York and LaNeta in Mexico City. In 2005, People Link merged with the May First tech group to become May First/People Link; in 2011 it took over LaNeta's hosting, and about 20% of its members have been in Mexico ever since; in 2015 an independent cooperative was set up in Mexico City to give Mexican members a local legal framework and ways to pay; and in June 2019 the members approved new bylaws — 16 to 20 board members elected by the members, five more by the staff, about five seats for Mexico in proportion to its membership, three-year terms. Its website says that from then on it became a "functional cooperative."

The cost of building and running its own infrastructure is recorded on its legal history page: in 2008 it dealt with infringement complaints against two activist-art websites, and in one of them refused The New York Times' takedown demand; in 2009, after a complaint from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an upstream provider cut its entire internet connection for one and a half hours without notice; in 2012 the FBI, with a search warrant, removed another collective's server from its rack, after a subpoena to which it answered that "we had nothing to turn over"; in 2014 it refused to hand over identifying information about an Independent Media Center member and then received a gag order; in 2015 it suffered the most serious distributed denial-of-service attack in its history, lasting several weeks; in 2023 it refused to take down a database of Los Angeles police officers; and in 2025 a photo claim by Agence France-Presse was dropped after the Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped in. Its answer is the cooperative model, governance by members and free software throughout — because only open source lets people audit, modify and truly control the tools they use. Its impact, it says, is measured not in services maintained, but in whether people and organizations can keep doing their work through a crisis.

Digital Empowerment Foundation (India — last-mile information services)

LONG FEI — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:40:13 -0700

The Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) was registered in Delhi, India, on December 16, 2002; its founder, Osama Manzar, has a background in physics. In his words, DEF was never a digital foundation, but a communication-based organization that uses digital as a tool and a medium. Its best-known approach is the SoochnaPreneur ("information entrepreneur") program, launched in 2016 with seed funding from a Qualcomm program to expand wireless access, and supported over the years by partners including the European Union, Nokia and Google. Rather than building computer rooms or centers in villages, DEF finds someone in the village who is willing to do the work, teaches them digital skills, gives them a printer and a tablet, and leaves the rest to them to run as a business; one SoochnaPreneur in Assam's tea gardens, for example, corrects errors on ID registrations, opens bank accounts, serves as the village's cash-withdrawal point and helps children submit scholarship applications. One shopkeeper in DEF's book did the math: making the trip to the district town to get one card — fares, photocopies and a lost day's wages — came to about 700 rupees; he offered to do it for 30. The time this business saves people is its income, so it can keep going without subsidies. By the organization's own 2026 website figures, the network has about 2,000 community information centers and 10,000 digital foot soldiers across 25 states and more than 250 districts, and has reached more than 35 million people over 23 years; the book DEF published in 2025 gives 2,200 SoochnaPreneurs in 26 states instead. The two sets of figures don't match, and both are self-reported.

The approach has its limits. Among the Toda tribe in the Nilgiri hills, the mountains broke up the signal and the first center couldn't stay afloat — DEF itself wrote that the area had been left "digitally stranded." What worked in the end was two women splitting the job: one took on the work that has to be done in person, the other moved to a spot with signal to handle online applications. Smartpur, a project in the Nuh district of Haryana, shut down around 2024, but its spokes, designed from the start as self-sustaining micro-businesses, survived — negotiating bandwidth with operators and repairing broken lines on their own. At one shop there, opened in 2018, the owner, Mustakeem, added a second screen on the counter facing the customer, so people could watch how their own transaction was being handled; his WhatsApp group became the place where the village checks whether something is "a new subsidy or a new scam." A biometric scanner can find dormant accounts and screen out false claimants — and, in the wrong hands, be used to cheat people. In Chanderi, sari weavers learned the JacDraw loom software after a 2009–2012 project had ended, and by 2025 the number of handlooms had grown from fewer than 3,500 before the pandemic to 5,500. The book's yardstick: don't measure by project cycles and burn rates, but by what the community keeps choosing after the money recedes. In 2016, DEF submitted recommendations on public Wi-Fi to India's telecom regulator, TRAI, and says several of them were written into the national public Wi-Fi framework of 2020 — this is the organization's own account; government documents don't name it.

Practical Action (UK — community-based flood early warning in Nepal)

LONG FEI — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:36:10 -0700

Practical Action was founded in Britain in 1966 by the economist E. F. Schumacher, author of *Small Is Beautiful*; originally called ITDG, it took its current name in 2005. Its Nepal office has worked on flood early warning since 2002, when it put up a watchtower and installed a siren in the village of Bhandara, in Chitwan — Nepal's first community-based flood early warning system. At the time, government agencies were finding it harder and harder to work in rural areas, so the organization set itself a bottom line: the system had to be managed by the community itself, with no dependence on outside support. The organization paid for the tower and the siren; choosing the site, buying the land, mobilizing villagers, and forming the management committee were all done by the village. Its core method is not equipment but a "demand model of information": rather than judging danger on the community's behalf, it puts the water-level reading from the upstream gauging station directly into the community's hands, and each village sets its own trigger line against its own memory of past floods. For dissemination, instead of making one siren carry farther, it multiplied the warning points — forty-three handheld sirens, distributed and managed by the communities themselves. A 2009 estimate put the annual running cost per river-basin system at under 20,000 rupees, about 250 US dollars. On June 28, 2008, the West Rapti River reached the 4.5-meter trigger line; starting at 7:30 a.m., the gauge reader phoned the village management committee, the district police office, the radio station, and the Chief District Officer in turn, and after that it was people downstream who called him to ask about the level — the first time the whole chain held in a real flood. By September of that year, the organization had largely stepped out of the warning chain. From 2010 the approach was extended to four rivers — the West Rapti, Babai, Mohana, and Karnali — with the Karnali basin covering 74 villages and giving people downstream three to five hours; more than a dozen rivers across the country have since adopted it.

Every step of this system was forced on it by reality. A siren rated to carry one and a half kilometers carried far less under monsoon rain on tin roofs, and its battery needed constant recharging; the long power cuts of 2006 and 2007 knocked out the high-powered torches and electric sirens at the same time, forcing a return to hand-cranked sirens and handheld megaphones; in September 2007, forty meters of road were washed away, the fiber-optic cable snapped, the whole telephone network went dead, and one upstream village could not warn three villages downstream. Today the system runs on automatic gauging stations and bulk text messages, and in 2023 Nepal became one of the first thirty countries in the United Nations' Early Warnings for All initiative — but the ice-and-rock flood of August 26, 2026 exposed a new break. The automatic station on the border read 1.62 meters and was then destroyed; the flood forecasting office learned of the flood from a phone call from the District Administration Office. The first alerts went out at 9:15, and the roughly 680,000 text messages sent within one minute did save many lives — yet the first threshold-crossing alert anywhere on the river came a hundred kilometers downstream, nearly three hours after the flood entered the country, and the last station downstream stayed green throughout. The Nepali Times post-mortem identifies two gaps: the stations only ask "how high is the water," never "how fast is it rising"; and there is no nationally unified protocol tying the red, yellow, and green warning levels to the duties of each level of government — and in the thirteen months after a flood in the same gorge killed eighteen people on July 8, 2025, not a single new protocol was put in place.

Village to Village Network (Boston, USA — a national network)

LONG FEI — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:25:32 -0700

In 1999, eleven older neighbors on Beacon Hill in Boston met and decided "we're not going anywhere." Over the following year, they turned that sentence into a nonprofit — Beacon Hill Village, founded in 2001, welcoming its first members in 2002. Members pay an annual fee in exchange for "one phone call handles everything": rides, home repairs, appointment companions, tech help, all arranged by the organization; services beyond the membership fee are provided by vetted vendors at a discount. A 2017 Massachusetts resource guide recorded the prices of the time — $675 a year for an individual, $975 for a household — with a separate income-based tier of $100 a year. In January 2010, Beacon Hill Village partnered with community-finance organization NCB Capital Impact, backed by a $250,000 grant from the MetLife Foundation, to scale the model into a national network — the Village to Village Network (VtVN). VtVN owns and certifies none of its Villages; it does just four things: a startup guide, one-on-one mentoring, an annual national gathering, and policy/funding advocacy. In 2025, VtVN partnered with Rutgers University on a national census: 245 Villages responded across 37 states (including DC), an 88 percent response rate, and more than 50,000 older adults participating, with transportation, errands, and tech help as the top three services.

This network also has its vulnerabilities. AARP's 2022 report found a strikingly homogeneous membership — about 95.7 percent white, roughly seven in ten women, 74 percent with household incomes above $50,000, and only about 11 percent non-white members; focus-group research points to insufficient cultural understanding, community tension, and anti-immigrant sentiment as key barriers. Financially, a Village earns an average of $115,000 a year, 44 percent from membership fees and 22 percent from individual donations, with government grants or contracts making up only 5 percent — these non-medical services can't be written into a government contract or reimbursed by insurance, and in a 2013 survey, 60.3 percent of Villages listed fundraising as a major challenge for the next five years. On staffing, every service-providing Village runs on volunteers; 27 percent of Villages have no paid staff at all, and roughly 40 percent of members also volunteer — the people serving and the people being served are often the same generation, which is exactly what worries the American Society on Aging's 2025 article: a Village's capacity basically stops at rides, errands, and companionship, with no capacity yet to take on the "oldest old" who need professional health and social services. On the technology side, VtVN's own website and its first Village each run on different generic membership-management software (ClubExpress and Helpful Village, respectively), with every Village its own independent instance and its data staying local — the price of that autonomy, per a 2024 RAND study, is that "the ability to collect and report data is severely limited."

CoopCycle (Paris, France)

LONG FEI — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:59:53 -0700

In 2017, a group of young French people opposed to the "Uberization" of food delivery met each other during a street movement and decided, instead of accommodating the platforms, to build their own delivery software — the starting point of CoopCycle, a federation of bike-delivery cooperatives. All of the federation's code is open, but the right to use it commercially is reserved for cooperatives that meet "social and solidarity economy" (SSE) standards and operate on an employee model rather than as gig contractors, governed by a one-cooperative-one-vote rule. A new cooperative doesn't have to build anything from scratch: paying 49 euros a month in membership fees in year one, then 2 percent of platform revenue afterward, is enough to start using the federation's shared, maintained software. By August 2025, the federation had grown to 57 cooperatives and collectives, spanning from Europe to the Americas. In 2018, a group of Barcelona riders whose accounts had been deactivated by delivery platforms used this model to found Mensakas — Catalonia's first rider-owned, employee-based delivery cooperative, where riders work ten to twenty-five hours a week at Spain's minimum wage. In August 2023, CoopCycle's general assembly in Grenoble, France disclosed that roughly 23 percent of hours worked inside the cooperatives go unpaid, and that riders' "ideal but realistic" wage is 1.5 to 2 times what they currently earn; to keep order volume up, Mensakas also joined a second-tier cooperative, Som Ecologística, subcontracting for large logistics companies — what researchers call a "grey zone."

Taking this software beyond Europe has proven harder than expected. Argentina's Central Salta cooperative tried the software from 2022 to 2024 without ever truly putting it to use, citing the difficulty of building trust around a "foreign" project; Chile's Por La Chita cooperative spent months getting the platform installed, then dissolved before ever actually using it. A programmer interviewed in Chile said the license only permits clean-energy vehicles — a real constraint in a country where delivery is dominated by motorcycles (this reflects the interviewee's own understanding of the license, not the license's actual text, which Desktop Lili re-verified against the original on 2026-09-11). By contrast, two small cooperatives in Santiago, Chile used the software temporarily — for about six months — purely to coordinate delivery routes, giving rise to a new "route coordinator" role; their goal was never to compete with Uber or Rappi for orders, but to do neighborhood-level "last mile" work that doesn't need a digital platform at all. Mexico City's volunteer food-delivery network became an official CoopCycle pilot, Rodando Juntas ("riding together"), in 2021, and by 2025 was building a regional union to pursue financing and labor rights. CoopCycle's founders have progressively handed control to a board democratically elected by its members, and its guiding principle remains growing "wide, not tall" — not one platform swallowing every city, but every city having its own rider-owned cooperative.

SEMA (Kampala, Uganda)

LONG FEI — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:00:36 -0700

In March 2018, Nathalie Dijkman, a Dutch criminologist, founded SEMA — "speak up" in Swahili — in Kampala, Uganda. She had previously worked as an East Africa program coordinator at a legal-innovation organization in The Hague, and her research kept her based in Uganda for long stretches. She found that a 2019 Transparency International survey showed nearly half of Ugandans who had used a public service said they'd paid a bribe to get it done, with the police widely seen as the worst offender — while Uganda's more than forty languages meant many citizens couldn't read or write and didn't own a smartphone, so the people who depended on public services the most had never had their real experience of them systematically collected. SEMA's response was to turn a feedback terminal into a physical device — a button painted with five faces — paired with a free USSD number, and place it at the exits of police stations, hospitals, and town halls, so that people who can't write, don't have a phone, or don't want to speak out loud could still be heard. What actually made the devices work was the "watchdog effect": SEMA issues a monthly report backed by evidence and created an "Office of the Year" award, pushing public servants to improve their conduct on their own; in 2019 alone SEMA received more than 32,000 pieces of feedback (including over 20,000 button ratings and more than 10,000 face-to-face interviews), and at one police station in Kampala, the rate of bribe demands fell from 25 percent to 5 percent over seven months.

Beyond monthly reports and Barazas (community gatherings), SEMA has kept pushing for more structural dialogue: in 2020 it tried "dialogue brokers" and "dialogue events" to put trend reports directly in front of police headquarters and senior officials — while also confirming a hard truth, that it's easy to change behavior on the ground and difficult to change power. Around 2024, SEMA partnered with Sunbird AI, a Kampala-based nonprofit AI lab, to upgrade the face button into voice feedback: citizens can now record a specific complaint in any of Uganda's forty-plus languages, which is transcribed, translated, and anonymized by Sunflower — an open-source model Sunbird AI released in October 2025 that supports 31 Ugandan languages and is currently the strongest translation model for 24 of them — before it reaches an office; the pilot is now live at Kasangati Health Center and the Old Kampala police station. SEMA's website says it has collected more than 80,000 pieces of citizen feedback to date and is now listening to "hundreds of thousands" of voices, with a vision that by 2030, the most commonly used public services across East Africa will all be built on citizen feedback.

Accountability Lab

LONG FEI — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:39:58 -0700

In 2012, Blair Glencorse founded Accountability Lab in Kathmandu, Nepal. He had previously worked at the World Bank studying fragile states, and had spent years asking young people around the world what they thought the biggest problem was — the answer he heard back, again and again, pointed to a single word: accountability. People in power needed to be held responsible, and corruption needed to stop. That was enough to make him leave the World Bank and set "make governance work for people" as his mission, building a "translocal" network of independently governed Labs across 20 countries — including Nepal, Liberia, Mali, Pakistan, Nigeria, and South Africa — that push accountability culture through unconventional formats: a reality-show-style naming campaign called Integrity Icon (launched 2014), the global anti-corruption hackathon HackCorruption, and the music project Voice2Rep. In 2025, when the U.S. government cancelled 83 percent of its foreign aid programs (roughly 5,200 contracts) and USAID formally stopped operating as an independent agency, local NGOs worldwide fell off a funding cliff — a UN survey found that three-quarters of local organizations had received termination notices, and some shut down entirely. Accountability Lab's response wasn't to fundraise or write a report — it launched Civil Society Wayfinder: instead of building a database, the team simply asks around — who do you know doing important work that no one sees? — and spotlights one local organization on LinkedIn every week. Before being named, each organization must clear checks on activity, media coverage, and legal status, receive final sign-off from the three co-CEOs, and give its own consent.

Wayfinder started with four focus areas — youth leadership, the power of storytelling, health information ecosystems, and decentralized funding — and added a fifth, gender equality, after the data showed an unusually large share of recommended organizations working on gender issues. Since launch, the list of spotlighted organizations has grown from a starting point of more than fifty to fifty-six, across 25 countries; the LinkedIn posts have drawn responses from more than 50 countries and over ten thousand views, producing a "cascade effect" as organizations began recommending each other. Harriet Mukajambo, team lead at the Uganda-based youth organization Global Learning for Sustainability (GLS), says the campaign helps civil society groups connect resources, build collaboration, and avoid duplicating work. But Accountability Lab is candid about the project's limits: Wayfinder offers no funding channel at all; the most active region is North America (148 interactions), while every spotlighted organization is in the Global South — a geographic mismatch the team openly acknowledges; and in countries like Pakistan, Nepal, and Mali, being named by an international organization can draw unwanted attention from authorities, so for some organizations the team only acknowledges the work without including them in the public campaign. The team's own conclusion: "visibility itself can act as a form of support," and "connectedness builds resiliency."

SafelyYou (San Francisco, USA)

LONG FEI — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 19:06:17 -0700

Founder George Netscher watched his grandmother and aunt both develop Alzheimer's, and he knew his own mother would likely face it too. So he made a decision: while there was still time, build her better care technology. The idea grew directly out of his PhD research at UC Berkeley's AI Research Lab — it took shape in 2014, and the company was formally founded in 2016.

SafelyYou's core model is simple: put a camera in every room and let AI watch around the clock for falls, alerting staff the instant one is detected. But the real value isn't the alert itself — it's the playback. The care team reviews the footage afterward to understand what actually caused the fall (a slippery floor, getting up too fast, a medication side effect), turning a single fall from "an accident" into "a sample you can learn from" that feeds back into the care plan.

The first outside validation wasn't venture capital — it was government research funding: the National Science Foundation backed R&D in 2017, and the National Institutes of Health funded clinical validation in 2018 — that test found a 41% drop in falls and a 69% drop in fall-related ER visits, becoming the foundation for everything that followed. A 2019 peer-reviewed study in The American Journal of Managed Care tracked dementia care facilities and found an 80% reduction in fall-related ER visits after adoption; the company's own data shows roughly a 40% reduction in falls themselves; a study covering 80 senior living communities and nearly 4,000 residents, released in late 2024, found that residents using the service stayed, on average, more than four months longer than those who didn't.

In 2021 the company raised two rounds — a $19.5M Series A in September and a $40M Series B by year's end; in early 2025 a $43M Series C brought total funding to more than $100 million. In early 2024, SafelyYou made Fortune's "Impact 20" list. Today it covers more than 1,000 senior living communities and over 50,000 residents.

The story has a real catch, too: the trade publication McKnight's ran a piece in July 2026 titled "Cameras Can't Save Lives," pointing out that people with dementia often lack the capacity to consent to being filmed 24 hours a day, and whether a family member's consent can substitute for the person's own will is an ethical question with no clean answer. Figures like "80%" come from studies with limited sample size and control design and still await independent replication; staff working under cameras also bear real costs to their professional trust and dignity. The industry now has "no-camera" alternatives — millimeter-wave radar, Wi-Fi sensing, audio monitoring.

Decidim

LONG FEI — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:27:29 -0700

In 2011, Spain's 15M movement swept the country — young people occupied Madrid's Puerta del Sol chanting "They don't represent us." Part of that movement later won political power in cities including Barcelona, but ran into a real problem: having campaigned on "participatory democracy," how do you actually get citizens to participate? Barcelona's city government first ran a fork of Consul, an open-source platform built in Madrid, starting in 2016, then tore it down in early 2017 and rebuilt from scratch as Decidim — Catalan for "We Decide," built on Ruby on Rails. Its first pilot drew forty thousand citizens, generating roughly eleven thousand proposals of which eight thousand were accepted; in the years that followed, a large share of Barcelona's city budget went toward implementing them. In 2019, Barcelona's government formally transferred the Decidim trademark and control of the codebase to the Decidim Association, an independent citizen-run body — what the project calls "recursive democracy," where even the governance of the platform itself is decided democratically.

By 2023, Decidim's own estimate put roughly four hundred city governments, regional governments, and civil society organizations using it; another study counted 311 running instances across Spain and nineteen other countries, with the Metadecidim community at around five thousand registered members. The platform's core module has more than eighty language files covering about sixty languages — one of the rare civic-participation platforms worldwide that systematically supports multiple languages (fewer than a quarter of comparable platforms do). But results have been uneven: Zurich's Wipkingen neighborhood scaled a participatory budget from 40,000 to 540,000 Swiss francs citywide the following year, while Lucerne's LuzernNord district — deployed top-down and available only in German — actually widened the digital divide instead of narrowing it. In Badalona, near Barcelona, the entire participation process stopped after the mayor was removed by a vote of no confidence in 2018 — a reminder that what the software can do and whether an institution is actually willing to give up power are two different things. In 2023, the UN-affiliated Digital Public Goods Alliance certified Decidim as a digital public good; users now include Mexico City's open government team, Spain's Som Energia energy cooperative, and the Mozilla Foundation.

CareYaya

LONG FEI — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:20:12 -0700

In 2022, Neal Shah — a former hedge fund partner in New York — wound down his fund after his wife was diagnosed with cancer, and spent two years as her full-time caregiver. During that time, he discovered that nearby college students studying nursing and pre-med were a more reliable source of care than traditional home-care agencies — but the practice was entirely informal, with no background checks, no training standard, and no insurance. CareYaya was founded to formalize that channel into a platform. The platform itself is completely free: families pay no platform fee, students pay no agency fee, and the $17–20 an hour families pay goes almost entirely to the student. The platform runs on donations and foundation/university partnership funding, including the American Heart Association, Johns Hopkins, and AARP's AgeTech Collaborative.

By 2026, more than 50,000 students are registered on the platform (from Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, and UT Austin), and it has facilitated more than 100,000 care connections; every student passes a background check and video interview before starting. The platform is also expanding into research and new products: a partnership with Duke uses AI to track Alzheimer's progression, a smart-glasses project (worn by seniors) screens for early cognitive decline, and the product line has grown to include an AI phone companion called QuikTok and a VR/neurotech hospice-care project featured on CBS News. Co-founder Gavry Eshet has said the model has so far only been validated within North Carolina — whether it can scale nationally or internationally (with interest already from Canada, Australia, and the UK) remains untested, and open questions remain around continuity of care as students graduate, and around liability under the "non-medical home assistance" classification.

Dimagi

LONG FEI — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:50:21 -0700

In 2002, two MIT students, Jonathan Jackson and Vikram Kumar, flew to Zambia intending to use health informatics to analyze data — and discovered there was no data to analyze at all. That discovery quickly pushed the company from health informatics toward global health software development: they first built electronic data-collection tools for clinicians in hospitals, then around 2008 shifted toward a larger group — community health workers who walk from village to village and are often the only healthcare providers in rural areas.

Dimagi's flagship product, CommCare, is a drag-and-drop mobile data-collection and workflow platform built offline-first: workers can enter data with no signal at all, and it syncs automatically once they're back in range. It has been open source since its founding in 2002, so any organization can download, modify, and deploy it for free — which is why the national medical records system built in Zambia around 2005 was later adopted by other African countries. CommCare's impact has been tested in randomized controlled trials in India, Tanzania, and South Africa (covering child nutrition, facility-based deliveries, and cardiovascular screening), with additional studies in Nigeria and Guatemala also showing positive results.

Legally, Dimagi is a for-profit company. It became a certified B Corp in 2008 and registered as a Benefit Corporation in 2012; founder Jonathan Jackson describes its decision order as "impact, team, profit." According to the organization's own website, Dimagi's software has been deployed in more than 130 countries, has over 76 million registered users, is the designated official community health platform in nine African countries, and has more than 120 peer-reviewed papers written about it. In recent years the product line has expanded to include video-observed treatment adherence for tuberculosis (SureAdhere), a pay-for-delivered-service marketplace called Connect (launched in 2022 with a $25 million investment from the Steele Foundation for Hope, expanded to seven countries and 77,000 people by 2023), and AI-assisted tools for malnutrition prediction and chatbot support.

Harambee (South Africa)

LONG FEI — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:57:53 -0700

"Harambee" is Swahili for "let's all pull together." In 2011, Nicola Galombik incubated the initiative inside Yellowwoods, a South African investment group, with the National Treasury's Jobs Fund providing the first matched grant. The insight behind it was blunt: among South Africans aged 18 to 34, one in two is NEET — not in education, employment, or training, with no formal work history to put on a résumé. Traditional hiring runs on résumés; Harambee built an assessment system that skips the résumé entirely, measuring cognitive ability, learning speed, numerical reasoning, and conscientiousness, turning an "inexperienced" young person into a set of numbers employers can read and trust.

Maryana Iskander became CEO in 2012 and scaled the goal from helping 10,000 people land a first job to an on-stage commitment at the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative to help 50,000 — a target Harambee later exceeded. As it grew, Harambee ran into another barrier: most young South Africans go online on prepaid data, and a single visit to a job site could cost a family a week's food money. So they made the SA Youth platform zero-rated across every network operator, removing "getting online" itself as a filter. The model was later validated in randomized controlled trials run with Duke University, the University of Oxford, and J-PAL, published in the American Economic Review (2022).

Today, SA Youth is no longer just an organization's project — it's national infrastructure, plugged into multiple South African government departments and connected to more than 3,000 employers. To date, over 4.6 million people have registered on the platform, 1.6 million have found income opportunities, and Harambee has helped generate a cumulative R45.2 billion (roughly $2.5 billion) in youth income. In 2024, Harvard Kennedy School turned Harambee into a case study — the school's first case built around a South African social enterprise. But the gap remains vast: in the first quarter of 2026, South Africa's official unemployment rate for ages 15 to 34 still stood at 45.8%. Current CEO Kasthuri Soni — on the founding team since 2011, and in the role since 2022 — puts it plainly: no single organization can solve a number like that alone.

Drinkwell (Bangladesh)

LONG FEI — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:09:58 -0700

Drinkwell grew out of a laboratory breakthrough. Bangladesh's groundwater naturally contains arsenic, and the World Health Organization estimates that twenty to forty-five million people nationwide drink arsenic-contaminated groundwater year-round — a crisis it has called "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history." In 2012, Bangladeshi American Minhaj Chowdhury, environmental engineering PhD Mike German, and Lehigh University professor Arup K. SenGupta took HIX-Nano — a hybrid ion-exchange nanotechnology developed in SenGupta's lab — out of the university and formally founded the company in 2013. The technology removes both arsenic and fluoride, can be regenerated and reused, costs 70% less than conventional reverse osmosis, and is far more water-efficient (RO typically wastes 40% to 60% of the water fed into it).

Drinkwell started out selling equipment, but quickly found that Bangladesh's utility companies could neither afford nor maintain standalone units. So they pivoted to an "embedded" partnership model: instead of competing with utilities, they plug into a utility's existing pipe network and take on the most technically demanding piece — removing arsenic and fluoride — delivering purified water to residents through community "water ATMs." This model has grown Drinkwell from a startup into Bangladesh's national water-security infrastructure operator: in 2026, the Asian Development Bank approved a $138 million sovereign loan to fund the expansion of its water-ATM and treatment-plant network nationwide. As of 2026, Drinkwell operates more than 300 water ATMs and 700-plus treatment plants across Bangladesh, has purified over 2.5 billion liters of water, and serves roughly three million people. In 2025, a similar project in West Bengal, India won the Assocham National Water Award, suggesting the model can replicate across regions.

Ushahidi (Kenya)

LONG FEI — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:49:09 -0700

Ushahidi was founded in 2008 in Nairobi. In December 2007, Kenya's presidential election erupted into a fraud dispute, and the country fell into violence — more than a thousand people died, three hundred thousand were displaced, and traditional media couldn't keep pace with events. Kenyan lawyer Ory Okolloh asked one question on her blog: was there a techie willing to build a mashup plotting where the violence and destruction were happening, using Google Maps? Programmer David Kobia, tech blogger Erik Hersman, and software engineer Juliana Rotich picked up the idea and, using the Google Maps API, PHP, and an open-source SMS tool called FrontlineSMS, built the first prototype in four days on close to zero budget. They named the tool Ushahidi — Swahili for "testimony."

The 2010 Haiti earthquake turned Ushahidi from a one-off election tool into global crisis-response infrastructure. The U.S. State Department and the UN reached out directly; volunteers translated Haitian Creole SMS reports into English and mapped nearly forty thousand reports covering more than four thousand distinct incidents, helping locate trapped people and supply gaps. Ushahidi has since been used for election monitoring in Nigeria, the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, humanitarian tracking during the Syrian civil war, and relief coordination after the 2015 Nepal earthquake. To address the problem of unverifiable crowdsourced information, the team later introduced a multi-channel verification system that cross-checks government reports, news sources, and citizen reports against each other.

Today, Ushahidi's open-source platform has been deployed in more than 160 countries, backed by funders including the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Google.org, and USAID. In 2013 it won a MacArthur "Genius Grant." Built in a matter of days on almost no budget, this crisis tool redefined what an ordinary person could do when disaster strikes — no need to wait for a formal institution: a phone and a text message is enough to become a coordinate on the relief map.

M-KOPA (Kenya/UK)

LONG FEI — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:58:56 -0700

M-KOPA was founded in 2010 in Nairobi. Its three co-founders — Nick Hughes, Jesse Moore, and Chad Larson — spotted a paradox: 70% of Kenyans had no bank account, yet 90% had mobile coverage, and the mobile money system M-Pesa was already moving money at scale. The question was what ordinary people could actually buy with it. Their answer was light: a $200 solar home system, financed through a GSM chip embedded in the device and a remote lock — customers pay a few cents a day through M-Pesa to "own it one day at a time." Pay on time and it runs normally; miss a payment and it locks automatically until the next payment unlocks it.

That self-enforcing collateral mechanism became M-KOPA's core engine. Around 2016 the company pivoted from solar to smartphones, and in 2023 it extended the same model to electric motorcycles — the product kept changing, but the underlying logic stayed the same: turn a daily repayment record into a credit history. After three months of stable payments, customers unlock digital loans, health insurance, and device protection.

Today M-KOPA operates in five African countries, has served more than 7 million customers, and has released over $2 billion in cumulative credit — 2.5 million of those customers got online for the first time through an M-KOPA device. What started as a hardware retailer has become a fintech company that uses its own credit-scoring system to redefine who deserves to be lent to.

BRAC: A Goat, a Bank, and an Empire

LONG FEI — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 21:11:41 -0700

BRAC began in 1972, in the ruins of Bangladesh's war of independence. Fazle Hasan Abed quit his accounting job in the UK to return home and help with relief work — only to find that handouts didn't solve the problem: after three months of food aid, people were still hungry. In 1974, he met a group of village women pooling money to buy a goat, and from that grew BRAC's core idea, the "lowest threshold of entry": instead of designing a perfect anti-poverty program, ask what a person needs, at minimum, to change their own life — the answer turned out to be about $20.

That entry point grew into an entire self-built system: no school, BRAC built one; no doctor, BRAC trained its own community health workers; no reliable way to move money, BRAC incubated the mobile payment platform bKash. Rather than farm problems out to others, BRAC turned every gap it found on the front lines into a new program of its own.

Today, BRAC is the largest development organization in the world, with more than 90,000 frontline staff across 11 countries. Its bKash platform is Bangladesh's first unicorn, valued at $2 billion. Bill Gates has said BRAC "achieved something very few have — large-scale health intervention among the poorest populations on earth."

Chengdu Aiyouxi Community Development Center

LONG FEI — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:59:50 -0700

Aiyouxi began in 2009 as a public-welfare theatre troupe — over 300 volunteers writing, directing, and filming short films on causes like blood donation. Along the way the team realized that "what happens outside the camera matters more than what's in the frame," and in 2011 it formally became a community social-work organization, putting down roots in the old courtyards of Chengdu's Shuijingfang area.

Its approach, "developmental social work," replaces one-way charity with a single network of mutual aid: the person who donates rice today may be the one receiving help tomorrow. The flagship "modern Righteous Granary" starts with "One Spoonful of Rice" — child volunteers knock on neighbors' doors to collect a spoonful of rice, cooked into "hundred-family porridge" for families in need — and grows into a chain of programs: the Righteous Market, the Righteous Workshop, and the "Theater of One Audience."

By 2023, the Righteous Granary had reached 107 cities and over 2,800 communities, linked 231 partner organizations, engaged more than 5 million participants, and was featured in UN-Habitat's *Shanghai Manual (2022)*.

Local Action：Crisis Text Line

LONG FEI — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:55:23 -0700

Crisis Text Line, founded in 2013, is the first and largest text-based crisis service in the United States. We believe everyone in crisis deserves to be heard.

Through a nationwide network of trained volunteer counselors, we provide free, confidential, 24/7 crisis support via text to millions globally. Text HOME to 741741 and connect with a counselor in 38 seconds—far faster than the 10+ minute average of traditional crisis lines.

As of 2024, we've handled over 9 million conversations. 68% of texters end conversations with a safety plan. We also operate CrisisTrends.org, publishing anonymized, aggregated mental health data as a free public resource—currently the world's largest public mental health dataset used by police departments, universities, and the CDC.

At the intersection of empathy and innovation, our mission is to ensure that anyone, anywhere, feels heard in their darkest moment.

This podcast series explores how data saves lives, how algorithms can augment human compassion, and how an organization built on data navigates questions of trust, governance, and the meaning of "safety" in the digital age.

XinTu's Transformation Story

LONG FEI — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:43:22 -0700

31 staff. 22,000 families. 6 cities. 47 communities.

Over twenty years, Shanghai's Xin Tu Community Health Promotion Society went through three fundamental shifts: from direct service delivery, to training community "Health Ambassadors" to serve their own neighborhoods; from labor-intensive expansion, to exploring digital platforms; and from centralized management, to a "sense-and-respond" organizational philosophy forged in the chaos of the pandemic.

Each transformation was forced upon them. But each time, they were already thinking, already experimenting.

This episode closes with three questions: Do the connections you've built survive without your organization? Where is your ceiling for growth? And are you a service provider — or infrastructure?