October 2019 Update: Voting is underway! Help us select which design Kintone should build to address childhood hunger. See all the ideas and provide your feedback today.
By now, you've probably heard that we're investing in solutions to reduce food insecurity for youth in the U.S. Frankly, I will tell you this is an issue close to my heart. I find it offensive that young people are going to bed hungry, starting their school day hungry, and navigating their communities hungry. This is one of the reasons I'm proud of Range — an app to help young people find free meals during the summertime, when schools are closed.
We are building on this work by bringing the strength of the TechSoup global platform — the technology, the people, the collaborators, and the will for change — to continue to address this issue specifically. Here's how.
Kintone Is Collaborating with Us to Develop Solutions
Kintone, a company that makes low-code software for building enterprise apps, has been a partner of ours for a while. They have sponsored our Public Good App House events, they have used our validation services to make their collaboration software available to nonprofits at a discount, and they have invited our team to speak at their social impact events.
This year, they decided they wanted to do more. They wanted to work with communities to develop solutions to address a specific social issue: food insecurity for youth.
We're excited to collaborate with them in a way that brings together resources for greater impact from across the TechSoup network — changemakers at civil society organizations, corporate partners, educational resources, and the resources of our product development group at Caravan Studios.
Our ambitious goal? Put Kintone's products to use, including many of their advanced features like JavaScript customizations and open API integrations, to meet the unique and specific needs of organizations working to make sure young people have enough to eat.
To do this, we brought together a variety of organizations at our San Francisco office for a Generate + Design session to confront the issue of food insecurity for youth in the U.S. The concept was simple: get to the core of the issue while compiling a pool of subject matter experts. The result? Three distinct concepts that will eventually be built into functional apps and technology products accessible to the greater community.
We Want Your Feedback
Right now, we are busy turning those concepts into low-fidelity prototypes (they're posters). We want your feedback on which ones to build and develop. You can help select the design and be a part of deciding what should be built. See all the ideas and provide your feedback today. Once it's compiled, we'll share that feedback both online and at our December 12 event in San Francisco.
Kintone is committed to working with their team to develop at least one of the identified solutions. We'll also keep you updated on that effort as details unfold.
All of this translates to a unique opportunity to give organizations working to end food insecurity at systemic and individual levels a tool that responds to one of their most pressing problems. It's at the heart of what we're about at Caravan Studios and TechSoup, and like everything else we do, we want you to be involved.
Give us your feedback, online or in person by voting for your favorite idea on the website once it's up.
This is our chance to make purpose-built solutions for an issue that we can no longer tolerate. Let's do it together.
I've been writing about the key strategic pillars that we are fundraising around in our Growth Capital Campaign. This project is a prototype of what we hope to do even more of. Learn more about our strategy in these three posts:
