Socialwyze

https://drive.google.com/file/...

When individuals face income disruption and other acute financial hardship, they are robbed of the bandwidth to pursue training and better employment that will lead to upward social mobility.

We help governments and donors pay unemployed and underemployed individuals to perform public benefit work in their communities. Nobody enjoys seeing the struggles of people experiencing eviction and homelessness and the resulting systematic waste in human potential. No taxpayer or donor wants to pay more for evictions, emergency room bills, and incarceration in perpetuity than solving the problem with robust transitional work programs.

Socialwyze’s mobile app solves a matching problem by pairing people who most need income with public benefit work that most needs to be completed. This creates a Digital Public Jobs Net that catches people immediately as a financial hardship arises and allows them to build a digital resume that projects trust to landlords and employers. 

https://drive.google.com/file/...

When people experience income disruption and face employment hardships, it robs them of the bandwidth to make intelligent career decisions and causes adverse childhood experiences and other trauma that impact lifetime outcomes for education, earnings, health, and crime. There are lots of gig economy apps to help people in a pinch, but most are inaccessible to our target demographic who lack the flexible transportation and equipment to generate income quickly enough to pay rent and support a household. There are lots of organizations that help with job skills training and interview prep, but they are frequently inconvenient to access and at best, yield interviews a month out. 78% of Americans are living paychek-to-paycheck (Career Builder), 25% of households experience income disruption in a given year (Urban Institute), and many evictions can be prevented for less than $600 (NYT Emily Badger).

When your family is hungry today and needs to keep a roof over their heads, people need immediate, barrier-free work that they can access in their neighborhoods on their own hours. We provide this flexible solution at a living wage to give people a puncher's chance at obtaining the financial breathing room necessary to pursue education, training, and quality employment.

Socialwyze’s mobile app connects workers with public benefit gigs and provides full transparency to government and charitable funders. The mobile app allows us to create the first Digital Public Jobs Net, which is a modern gig economy twist on FDR-style work programs.

Governments and Donors fund a “community fund” to pay income insecure individuals to perform public benefit work in their local communities, which increases their chances of securing private employment by up to 51%. Payers receive robust analytics on outputs like trees planted and meals served and outcomes like reductions in eviction, recidivism, and emergency room visits.

Nonprofits like community gardens, food banks, and beach cleanups, post “gigs” on the Socialwyze platform, facilitate work activity, and rate performance.

Workers, who could be anyone experiencing financial hardship or barriers to employment, use the Socialwyze platform to book gigs and get paid to perform public benefit work. They can choose between multiple meaningful projects within their community on their own hours, leaving ample time for education, training, and other life obligations. Then, they leverage their digital resume  to signal to private employers their credibility via hours worked, star rating, and a searchable skills database.

Socialwyze Workers include people experiencing employment hardship, be it individuals who are experiencing homelessness, facing eviction, formerly incarcerated, veterans with PTSD, or workers displaced by automation. 

We are partnered with Miles of Freedom, a local prison reentry nonprofit, to test our app helping local donors pay formerly incarcerated individuals to distribute produce in South Dallas. Our team has been volunteering with MOF alongside their constituents who are paid workers in our pilot program for the past six weeks to better understand their needs and improve the user experience (UX/UI) of our app. The participants in this program have become dear friends who come over to our startup house for breakfast to help us improve the app and our understanding of the hardships black Americans face everyday.

Workers can choose between multiple meaningful projects within their community on their own hours. This leaves ample time for education, training, childcare, and other life obligations. It also provides them with immediate income to pay for food, rent installments, and utility payments. Then, socialwyze workers leverage their profile as a resume to signal to landlords and private employers their credibility. Workers also acquire a quasi-banking experience and greater digital access to social services.

The worst time to make decisions is when you are desperate. How can people pursue training and education that enables them to pursue optimal jobs when they are hungry and worried about housing?

Step 1 of the solution needs to be removing the financial boot from the throat with immediate transitional work that pays at a living wage. Step 2 is to leverage their digital attention to point them to local 3rd party educational and training resources. Step 3 is to help them leverage all of their work and knowledge to connect with employers via their digital resume.

Full Time team: 6 people

Contractors: 2 people

- 1 full time

- 1 part time

The foundation of our organization is providing increased opportunity to individuals experiencing financial hardship, and the cold hard reality is that our society has systematically deprived blacks and other minorities of equal access to upward mobility. The workers that we have helped to date are exclusively black, and the neighborhoods we have deployed them in to perform public benefit work are predominantly black. We hope to scale our solution over time to help all struggling communities, but in Dallas Texas, the ugly history of redlining has created isolated black neighborhoods with horrendous food deserts and job prospects. We can’t wait to receive grant funding and grow revenue to be able to hire star participants from our public benefit work projects to be full time community liaisons for our company. Nobody knows the community’s problems like the members of the community.

We help solve multiple SDGs simultaneously. We solve a matching problem that is equally appealing to poverty and environmental funders, be it governments, foundations, corporations, or individuals. We pair people who most need work with public benefit work that most needs to be completed in their local communities.

The net impact of our innovation is that we will attract more involvement from local donors to fund local workers performing public benefit work on the most impactful local projects. This will lead to improved local communities for donors to enjoy with fewer evictions, less homelessness, lower crime, and improved economic, health, and educational outcomes. When donors can see and feel the benefit of their contributions, they will make them in greater quantity. 

We solve the most fundamental human problem—income, most expensive global problem—poverty, with the most scalable payers—governments and foundations, most cost-efficient intervention window—immediate, and most ubiquitous distribution medium—smartphone.

Our successes will be measured by outputs like number of workers, hours worked, pounds of trash, meals served, etc. and more importantly, outcomes like number of evictions preempted, housings obtained, and private employments facilitated. We will also perform comparative analyses against control groups on crime rate, healthcare expense, household educational outcomes, etc. 

Our platform makes high impact donations available to everyone with discretionary funds. We help donors to Community Funds to provide immediate barrier-free public benefit work to people of all backgrounds. Scaling inclusive and equitable solutions is what we do.

At its core Socialwyze is a gig economy mobile application that multiplies the effects of charitable dollars by refusing to silo societal problems and instead viewing them as interconnected. By efficiently connecting individuals who most need work with work that most needs to be completed we can simultaneously provide income to those who most need it most while completing public benefit work that otherwise would be left undone. We aren’t developing revolutionary technology, but we are building a new app , similar in functionality to TaskRabbit, that capitalizes on an innovative new business model that better serves our direct stakeholders and society as a whole.

TaskRabbit meets FDR-style work programs PLUS digital connections to education, training, and private employment.

Our app also tracks outputs (trees planted, meals served, etc.) and outcomes (evictions prevented, private employment obtained, etc.) so that government and charitable funders can monitor Social ROI and measure Public Cost avoidance.

Gig economy applications like Uber and TaskRabbit are everywhere, and government initiatives like FDR-style work programs, Americorps, and Federal Work Study have a long history of success in the US. We provide a marriage of the two concepts by creating a gig economy Digital Public Jobs Net. To promote upward mobility, we must first go to war with financial desperation to liberate individual bandwidth to pursue training and a better future. 

We must use the most accessible digital tools to scale this solution, and the mobile phone is the perfect medium. Mobile ubiquity is inevitable, and even today, 58% of the homeless population in the US currently maintains a working smartphone (https://socialinnovation.usc.e...). 

We have had tremendous success with our pilot program with Miles of Freedom in South Dallas helping formerly incarcerated individuals access immediate barrier-free public benefit work through their smartphones. Our best example of feasibility is a gentleman who was released from prison less than a year ago after serving 38 years. It wasn't easy learning how to navigate a gig economy work app, but he was successful for two major reasons: 1 he needed the immediacy and flexibility of the work and was committed to success, 2 the app is designed with a super simple User Experience that caters to people with minimal technology skills.

Our theory of change is that if society creates ubiquitous transitional work through a Digital Public Jobs Net, millions of people can avoid financial desperation and the associated trauma and unlock time in their schedules to pursue training and education that can lead to long term prosperous careers.

With education, the problem isn’t that American teachers are significantly worse than Finnish teachers. The root problem is that more American children show up to class hungry and emotionally unwell and are robbed of the bandwidth to succeed in school. 

The same principle applies to adults and their careers. Step 1 needs to be systematically attacking financial desperation with immediate, flexible work that can be conveniently accessed in their community. Step 2 is to leverage digital attention to push people to local training, education, resources, and Step 3 is to leverage their digital resume to help them get connected with long term employment that fits their passions, skills, and career goals. The problem with the status quo is that we omit step 1, and millions of people never make it to step 2.

We endeavor to expand our Dallas pilot to work projects cleaning parks, planting trees, tending community gardens, and much more in addition to our food distribution pilot. The more projects we facilitate on the platform, the easier it is to mitigate the transportation burden for workers, and the more people we can help remove the boot from their throat financially. Once Dallas operations achieve scale and we have data that proves we are helping people pursue training and better employment, we will aggressively pursue new markets. We have close government contacts and active conversations with the State of Hawaii via State Senator Chris Lee and Lieutenant Governor Josh Green. Chris is sponsoring legislation in January to fund a statewide initiative that will stipulate an RFP process. We have similar close relationships in Oklahoma with the Secretary of Commerce and Workforce Development and State Representative Mickey Dollens, who is sponsoring similar legislation to Chris Lee.

Once we succeed in our first 3 markets, our next cities will be determined by existing relationships and demand. The Bay Area, San Diego, Seattle, and Los Angeles best meet these criteria, and we are aggressively connecting dots in those markets to pave the way to successful implementation within 3 years.

Between 3-5 years out, we aim to secure various types of federal funding and leverage network effects to scale nationally. Realistically, international expansion will occur between 5-10 years out. We are solving a fundamental human problem that impacts billions of people and governments across the globe.

Obtaining government funding won’t be easy, but if we demonstrate public cost avoidance through exclusively charitably-funded pilots, government funding is an inevitability. We have the relationships for the charitable funding, but more is always better. Working with a Workforce Solutions Board would dramatically accelerate the government funding process.

We have no problem finding workers, as every homeless shelter, sober living facility, halfway house, prison reentry program, and veterans with PTSD organization we have met with would love to provide a pipeline of workers who have smartphones, want to work, and could greatly benefit from an immediate, flexible work solution that provides connections to training and a digital resume that helps prove credibility to employers.

We have no problem finding nonprofit organizations who wish to scale their produce distributions, community gardening, beach cleaning, and tree planting.

We will demonstrate efficacy of public cost avoidance and bona fide upward mobility promotion with charitable dollars, and governments won’t be able to refuse participation. 

We have on our Advisory Board former Albuquerque Mayor RJ Berry who founded the famous homeless work program There is a Better Way who is helping lead our government relations activities. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rj...

We also have former OKC Mayor Mick Cornett on our Advisory Board who is the former President of the US Council of Mayors. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mi...

We are collaborating closely with https://x4i.org/ and external grant writing teams to aggregate matching charitable funding for "Community Funds" that pay for the labor in our model.

We are creating a robust content campaign to tell the stories of the individual workers' upward mobility journeys and the net impact to the communities to feed a crowdfunding campaign that will provide even more matching funds for local "Community Funds."

We will easily measure outputs like trees planted and meals served, and we will fairly easily track evictions prevented, private employments secured, etc. At scale, we wish to be able to show the impact of our program on lifetime earnings, education, healthcare, crime, etc. for our participants. We need data, time, and data science man hours.

I have inspired our team to achieve excellence by possessing the courage to tackle society’s biggest challenges and the patience to truly listen to the opinions of all team members and stakeholders. We have 3 software engineers, a designer, a product manager, a marketer, and a business development person in addition to me as CEO. Each of them is the most talented person I know in that domain, and we all have a burning passion for the mission of manufacturing upward mobility.

By performing hundreds of hours of user interviews, we were able to listen and learn what each stakeholder wanted in my model. That allowed me to craft a scalable systemic solution that would gain universal support from politicians, nonprofit leaders, and low-income workers.

When every member of a team believes that our common mission will raise the quality of life of millions of people around the world, an aura of collective efficacy takes hold. With Socialwyze, I have assembled a consortium of the most influential gate keepers across the political spectrum to support my initiative of upward mobility through the dignity of work. My Advisory Board contains 2 proud Republicans—former Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry, who pioneered the “There’s a Better Way” homeless work model, and  former Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, who served as the President of the US Conference of Mayors (2017)—along with a litany of progressive political and nonprofit leaders. Republicans care about incentivising the work ethic. Democrats care about increasing opportunities for low-income citizens. 

EarthX https://earthx.org/

Socialwyze Founder and CEO Cody Merrill is currently the entrepreneur-in-residence at EarthX. The program was created to provide entrepreneurs an opportunity to incubate their ideas and spur innovation for environmental benefit. Resident entrepreneurs are provided with resources to help bring world changing ideas to market. Through the program Cody was given an opportunity to speak at the 2020 Concordia Summit and has been connected with countless organizations in the Dallas metro. 

Miles of Freedom https://milesoffreedom.org/

We are partnered with Miles of Freedom, a local prison reentry nonprofit, to test our pilot version of the app where we help local donors pay formerly incarcerated individuals to distribute produce in South Dallas. Our team has been volunteering with MOF for the past six weeks to better understand the needs of our constituents and modify our design to better reflect those needs.

X4Impact https://x4i.org/

X4Impact is a free marketing intelligence platform for social innovation. We have partnered with them to help us aggregate data to help us more accurately solve our problem and connect with funding opportunities such as this MIT SOLVE grant. Our X4Impact Solutions page can be found here. 

Governments, Corporate Social Responsibility Programs, Foundations and crowd funding platforms fund a “wage bank/community fund” to cover wages for individuals to perform public benefit work in their local communities. Payers receive transparency on their investment and advanced analytics on individuals with some of the highest usage rates of ERs and social services.

Nonprofits like community gardens, food banks, soup kitchens, and public land improvement organizations post “gigs” on the Socialwyze platform, supervise the work activity, and rate workers.

Workers will be anyone experiencing employment hardship, be it individuals experiencing homelessness, formerly incarcerated individuals, veterans with PTSD, or workers displaced by automation. They can choose between multiple meaningful projects within their community on their own hours, leaving ample time for education/training, childcare, etc. Then, they leverage their profile as a resume to signal to landlords/employers their credibility via hours worked, star rating, and a searchable skills database. Workers also acquire a quasi-banking experience and greater digital access to social services.

Socialwyze software connects workers with public benefit gigs, while providing transparency to payers, in exchange for a 12% hourly markup “Software Fee.”

Initially Socialwyze monetizes every hour of labor deployed through our platform with a 12% markup, which is far less than your average staffing agency. In the long run we plan to reduce our markup to 0% and only monetize from hiring agencies and companies when they utilize our database of worker profiles to identify and hire qualified candidates. 

We don't see our value chain stopping at the barrier-free transitional public benefit work. We want to monetize individual connections to private employment made possible by their Socialwyze digital resumes and our locally aggregated talent databases. Given that a janitorial lead is worth $100, there is serious sustainable revenue in facilitating connections to private employment.

Also, there are numerous pro upward mobility 3rd party products and services we wish to introduce our users to once we have their digital attention such as online training programs, local vocational training programs, community colleges, GoodRx Cards https://www.goodrx.com/, discounted produce deliveries https://www.imperfectfoods.com..., checking accounts, reloadable debit cards, and much more. Many of these actions are monetizable.

We have raised seed money from Mark Cuban and other strategic investors, and we look to supplement this with grant funding, earned revenue, and subsequent equity financing rounds. We are also considering Pay-For-Success financing associated with Public Cost Avoidance.

We have a diverse portfolio of monetization strategies that will gradually drive long term value, but like most all high potential software startups, we need outside capital to fund growth.

Our revenue to date is minimal, but our pilot has only existed for 6 weeks.

I had to work on Socialwyze for 1.5 years part time and 1.5 years full time before we were able to close investment in August 2020 and hire our team. The participation of Mark Cuban and EarthX.org is opening doors and creating a wave of momentum.

We will look to raise a minimum of $5M within the next 12 months to fund growth. We are still pursuing relationships with other top strategic investors, because the more the merrier.

Debt financing likely won't be feasible for the first 5 years.

Applying for grants like this are vital to supplementing our budget to invest in our technology product that will make national scale feasible. The money is nice, but the connections and credibility are also extremely valuable.

$550k within 12 months before our next financing round.

12 months is our current runway, and we would like to agree to a term sheet within 10 months to be safe. EarthX.org is paying for two team member salaries for two years as part of a formal Entrepreneur-In-Residence partnership, so I would argue very few investors are buying as much manpower per dollar as Socialwyze investors. 

Grants of this nature could provide tremendous flexibility to achieve greater growth before our next equity financing round. Our concept touches on multiple impact domains, so we will be eligible for innovation grants relating to workforce, poverty, nutrition, environment, and community building. However, workforce innovation is the truest fit.

The driver of our business model is donor and government funding used to pay Socialwyze contractors. We truly believe our model offers a superior return and transparency for the use of those dollars. Becoming a winning candidate and working with the Challenge Partners, would open doors to charitable dollars and secure more permanent funding through government contracts.  

True success is when our users graduate from our application and find stable employment. We offer a helping hand, a stepping stone, and a chance when none other is given but we don’t envision being a permanent work solution. Partnering with the existing hiring infrastructure such as staffing agencies and workforce solutions boards is critical for the transition of Socialwyze contractors into full time employment. Additionally, blue collar workers and job opportunities are highly localized markets, we intend to make our database of workers queryable for local blue collar employers to help them identify candidates that meet their business needs and simultaneously accelerate our users path to private employment.

To be clear, grants like the MIT Solve Reimagining Pathways will feed growth of our technology and will not go to charitable "Community Funds" that pay labor in our model. It is hard to raise capital as a social enterprise, and we need to continually supplement our equity financing rounds with non-dilutive charitable grants.

Grant partnerships with organizations like MIT, IDEO, Gates Foundation, Mordridge Family Foundation, New Profit, Kauffman Foundation, Ford Foundation, etc. provide credibility that unlocks doors to major foundation and government funding.

If we can get in the room with organizations that control the largest pools of capital to be allocated towards social spending, we can demonstrate that our stacked value props deliver superior Social ROI and Public Cost Avoidance. We aren't saying spend more. We are saying use this vehicle to spend better and more easily achieve scale.

We have the relationships for nonprofits to refer workers and deploy labor. We are batting 1,000 on all of those conversations in Dallas, Oklahoma, Hawaii, and the Bay Area. We have no problems finding more operational partnerships. 

In the short term, Workforce Solutions Greater Dallas is close and would be a fantastic first step towards scalability. We would like to partner with them to grow our existing pilot program and help our Dallas users find full time employment. We would also like to use the partnership to access federal government dollars to help fund the transitional workers using our app. We have spoken to Workforce Solutions Greater Dallas, and they love our mission and expressed eagerness for future collaboration.

We then want the City of Dallas to match the federal dollars from local workforce boards to fund labor in a similar model to what our Advisor former Mayor RJ Berry implemented in Albuquerque. Same story but at the State level for Hawaii and Oklahoma.

Across the country, there is no shortage of public benefit work that needs to be done, and there is no shortage of individuals in need of transitional work that provides the flexibility to pursue long term career success. In the long term, we would like to replicate our success in Dallas and partner with every workforce solution board associated with this program and other across the country that can utilize our software to equip our society's most neglected population. 

Our playbook will be to start with local workforce boards and then look to expand partnerships, to cities, states, local foundations, local corporations, and local crowdfunding. 

Your vast connections with workforce boards could tremendously help us scale our solution.