The Genesis of The Big Thing for Humanity (TBT)

Why are we here?  Well, in the course of helping various individuals and families through various civic and charitable organizations, especially Southeast Volusia Habitat for Humanity (SEVHFH), Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI) and the Rotary club of New Smyrna Beach, we came to understand several things.  There are common reasons why people were in need of assistance:

1. While there are some stereotypical “lazy” or “entitled” people, there were far more people who wanted to better themselves, that were proud and would prefer to be self-sufficient, not dependent upon charity or government subsidies.
2. While there are many charitable organizations that aim to help people in need, and there are varying degrees of governmental assistance (be it local, state, or federal), there is very little coordination among them to help a person get from where they were, dependent upon charity or government assistance, to a life where they could sustain themselves.
3. Around the world, there are good people willing to provide a hand up those in need. People are less willing to just keep providing hand-outs. This willingness crossed most demographics: age, race, religion, gender, political party affiliation, etc.
4. While there are some services, notably 211.org (supported by United Way), that provide a catalog of local and governmental services, there are shortcomings with each of them, including limited catalog of services because of limited manual outreach, and no planning with a person of which service to use first, second, etc.
5. Most services have a prerequisite, a cost, and a capacity, and a time that it takes to consume that service. For example, a Habitat house requires a certain credit score, and requires a certain income to make payments.  The affiliate can maybe build 10-20 houses a year, and it takes a year from the time someone is accepted until they can move into their house.
6. Some of the prerequisites are understandable, but counter-intuitive: for example, many homeless shelters require that someone be sober. Some battered women’s shelters won’t take families with male children over the age of 14. This makes it harder for people who really need these services to obtain them.
7. When someone doesn’t qualify for a service, it is typically because they fall short of the prerequisite (they aren’t over-qualified, but under-qualified, or just have attributes that disqualify them as in the previous point) or the service is too expensive. Thus, in order to obtain the goods provided by a given service, someone must first find a way to meet those prerequisites by using some other services. This really hit home during a visit to the Collier County Florida Habitat for Humanity. The executive director / CEO at the time, Sam Durso, said that their affiliate serviced people making as little as 25% of the median family income for their county. That is, they were able to sell houses to people making as little as $12,500/year at the time. When asked, “How do you do that?”, Same replied, “Well, the first thing we do is get them a better job.”

This led to our epiphany:

1. There is often this sequence of events that people in need must go through in order to obtain a sustainable life. But people don’t know where to start, where to find the services they need, how to better themselves unless they just happen to stumble upon it.
2. There not only needs to be a catalog of services, but a way to build a path through those services, given any individual or family’s state.
3. In order to scale, the building of the paths must be done programmatically, which further requires codification of both a person’s state and a services attributes into a machine-actionable form.
4. If the system can’t find a person a path through the existing services to a sustainable life, then there is what we call a “gap” in services. Gaps can exist for several reasons including that it exists but there is no capacity OR that the service is needed sooner than it can be acquired OR because it is too expensive OR because it just doesn’t exist (such as a women’s shelter that accepts male children over 14).

With this, the idea was born. It didn’t have a name. After several ideas, during a session with Giselle Timmerman (with Silicon Valley Change), we described our desire to build out this system. She said, “Wow. That’s a big thing you are trying to do.” Thus the name was born, The Big Thing. After a search for corporate names, we chose The Big Thing for Humanity. The rest, as they say, is history… or more properly, the future.  We hope you will join us.