Keep.id

Team Keep as an organization with a Christ-centered mission aims to grow relationships with and serve those experiencing homelessness and lacking identification. Team Keep will strengthen existing relationships between the homeless and nonprofit organizations, employment agencies, and aid services.

Keep.id is a cloud-hosted document storage platform. Information transfer for the homeless reduces friction in juggling various different organizations and aid sources. Keep.id hopes to expand upon the HMIS space in utilizing computer software to more ably service the homeless population.

Team Keep is currently set to serve the homeless population of Philadelphia and other communities in Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia alone there are 5,800 chronically homeless and almost 7,000 students who experience homelessness. For those trying to reenter the workforce and society, identification is essential and the homeless do not have the means to keep their identification safe. Keep.id allows the homeless to store their identification documents, job and other applications in the secure cloud and access them with a computer and Internet. Team Keep will also grow relationships between the homeless and other nonprofits, government agencies, and related associations.

Keep.id is a website where users can upload documents (identification) and also (in-progress) work on auto-filled job applications. The homeless would create a Keep.id account at a local nonprofit, which helps them obtain identification, which is then stored on the site and able to be accessed via the Internet. Users can then send documents and applications to government agencies. Team Keep will provide Chromebooks where necessary.

More broadly, Team Keep through Keep.id aims to streamline interactions between homeless and agencies and thereby facilitate their hopeful departure from homelessness.

Our primary target population is the homeless, right now the homeless of Philadelphia. As we grow we aim to expand beyond Philadelphia and hit other major homeless areas such as Baltimore and New York City.

We will not only provide them with the means to store their identification online and not be able to lose physical copies, but also streamline their relationships with other organizations working to ease their return to society. While the product itself is online, we hope to work with nonprofits and engage with the homeless in person as much as possible (after things return somewhat to normal).

Lack of identification is a major obstacle for homeless seeking to reenter the workforce and larger society. Around half of homeless persons are denied access to shelters or housing services, food stamps, and Medicaid/other medical services simply due to lack of identification. With the ability to send their applications (with and filled out from their identification stored in Keep.id) to such agencies, the homeless can not only gain access to aid services but also reacquire employment and, eventually, a home.

Currently our biggest barrier is long-term sustainability - two of our chief developers will be starting full-time jobs and for the site to be developed successfully, eventually we will need to work full-time. As such, ensuring a steady enough flow of revenue while still holding true to the non-profit mission is something we're thinking about.

We are still developing the product and hope to have it finalized and ready for beta testing by the end of the summer. We currently have $7,000 but our membership is composed entirely of undergraduate and recently graduated students, and we want to be able to pursue Keep.id full-time eventually.

However, while funding towards this would be welcome, it is the continuing support that Solve provides that is attractive. We are fairly new to the nonprofit world and would benefit immensely from mentorship and valuable connections in our first few years of growth. We believe in the applicability of Keep.id in not just Philadelphia but any region with homelessness, and to not only sustain Team Keep but also enable it to pursue that long-term dream would be gratifying.

One of the most prevalent topics of discussion we have had concerns our business model. Ideally, we would provide Keep.id to nonprofits (which would work with the homeless) for free. But being able to sustain both the application and our members (most particularly the developers) long-term requires financial stability. As we are still relatively new to the system, receiving guidance vis-a-vis long-term sustainability while remaining true to our non-profit vision would be beneficial.

In addition, marketing and media development is also of importance given our desire to sustain ourselves from donations and grants and not just partnerships with other nonprofits.