Digital: Disrupted: Are Outdated Systems Standing in Our Government’s Way?

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Paul Muller: I mean it's a nice segue to talk about equity and helping the needy. So, let's talk a bit about benefits disbursement and administration. And it sounds a little longish and super government process nerdy. So, I've got to ask the question, what inspires a young woman or man in your case to get into this space? You've clearly got a social justice backbone from your answer to the question about housing. Tell us a bit about you.

David Helene: So, I started a nonprofit organization with a couple of friends of mine where we were focused on how you think through financial empowerment where you're not telling people here is how to manage the money that you don't have, but rather focusing on experiential learning points that were practicable, that would actually lead to intergenerational wealth accumulation. And for us that inflection point was the college going inflection point for low-income high school students. So, the organization you mentioned was the nonprofit that we ran originally as a moonlighting gig where we took vacation time in our summers, we run after school. And in longer term, six-week programs that were really helping students understand the net cost of college, inclusive of cost of living. When you peel back the onion, what we found out is that colleges actually have a lot of latitude about how they estimate cost of attendance and cost of living.

And it can be the case that colleges under-represent the cost of living by as much as 30%. And when they're doing that, you're talking not about tuition, that's pretty ecstatic, but you're talking about what it costs to live, right? Housing, food, transportation, childcare, basic needs. And as we continue to get more familiar with this problem it became abundantly clear that students can do everything in the planning process and find themselves fundamentally insolvent the second they set put on a college campus, which is why about 50% of college students in the US deal with issues like housing insecurity and food insecurity and those are fundamentally conditions of poverty. So that is what pushed me into the anti-poverty space that led to some of the early innovations that was then equity where we were administering emergency cash grants on behalf of colleges and universities to make sure that they got the students fast, equitably, effectively, and in service of student retention.

But it turns out, Paul, that students are humans too. And they're humans that need access to the traditional social safety net just like others. And it may be somewhat surprising to hear, but we've reached an inflection point where more than 50% of students are over the age of 25, where they're quote non-traditional, where 25% has a dependent. So, these are folks who are working, these are folks who need access to benefits, and that actually pushed Beam into the benefits access space. So that is how someone like me got motivated to try to make sure the benefits reached those who need them the most at the time that they need it.

PM: You anticipated my next question, which is the design process. If I was trying to design a system or process or an application, I would struggle to put myself in the mindset of the individual's concern. How do you get through that when you've got your development team and others working? How do you get into the perspective of the people you're trying to help?

DH: Yeah, it's a great question and for us it's really important. It's not about trying to get into someone's head space and sort of pretending, right? It's really about bringing those folks into the process. It's a quasi-co-design process of making sure we're conducting interviews with folks, that we're showing them early mockups, that they're reacting, that they're actually making recommendations. We've done many interviews that are with Spanish as the first language, understanding that a lot of applicants are not going to be speaking English first. So, thinking about needing to accommodate different languages and of course the different cultural implications of how folks are interacting with family reciprocity, how they submit these applications. So, there's a painstaking process that goes into the applicant and constituent side, but that's not our only user. We also are serving case managers who are dealing with tremendous secondary trauma who are having to deal with complex rules and they themselves are not necessarily policy experts who are fully on top of the most recent federal guidance or the interactions between agencies and data sharing agreements and implications they're in. So, we've also built quite closely with both city and state and county officials, but also the nonprofit organizations that act as the sort of contractors to government and their agents on their behalf. So, as we think about intentional design for us, there are multiple stakeholder groups that we need to bring into our design process and that we do on a very, very regular basis.