Vision in the Face of Adversity
Impact beyond product
It’s cliché but apt: the last six months have been a roller coaster ride for DACA Time. Our team formed around nothing more than an idea on March 31, 2017 and has since been humbled by generous contributions from local organizations and uplifted by the support of our community.
On August 23, 2017, our social entrepreneurial journey culminated in the SEA Change pitch event, the outcome of which positioned us for immense acceleration toward fulfilling our promise to Dreamers to lower the barriers associated with receiving DACA.
Less than two weeks later, the very core of our strategy for fulfilling our mission was obliterated. Our nascent product, intended to be the TurboTax® for DACA applications, simply ceased to have meaning in the new reality following DACA’s rescission on September 5.
Purely from a product perspective, the pains associated with the DACA application process eliminated with a single announcement, the jobs-to-be-done by DACA applicants crudely pushed aside.
The value proposition of DACA Time’s product has ceased to be, at least until such time as congress passes legislation that offers Dreamers a pathway to success in this country and we’re able to help relieve the pains of whatever that new process looks like whenever that time comes.
The strategy we’ve been carrying for the last six months is — for now — quite frankly kaput.
But that’s where our vision kicks in.
Open for Impact
The recent events surrounding DACA, rather than diluting our resolve, has catalyzed us toward action beyond the development of our product. Until the world needs the DACA Time product, the DACA Time team continues to advocate for the protections Dreamers deserve.
Reliant upon our strategy and product alone, we might have packed it in — noted that there simply wasn’t a need for what we were doing anymore and thanked everyone for their time. But our vision fuels our perseverance, which is what makes something larger than an organizational strategy so important.
We continue to make an impact — through our reach, through our support, and through our community involvement. The pains our product intends to address are no longer imminently addressable, but the very real and simply human pains Dreamers are going through right now are urgent. We have no technology to offer to address those pains, but we have a dedicated team nonetheless actively working on ways to facilitate the change that will.
We’ve shifted our strategy and mission from the microcosm of DACA application issues to the macrocosm of immigration reform for Dreamers, and we were able to do so with little friction because it aligns with our vision:
All DACA-eligible individuals receive the benefits and protections of DACA, regardless of income.
The benefits and protections are what matter, not the mechanism through which they’re bestowed. The people, the families, and the communities that will be horrifically affected by the loss of work authorization or by the deportation of Dreamers are where our true impact lies.
We wrote almost three months ago about imagining a world in which DACA Time doesn’t need to exist and crafting our vision around that. Such a world is not the one in which we find ourselves today.
And so we’re still working on it.
