Why We Started Kiip
Kiip’s vision is to help the five billion people on the Internet improve their lives through better management of their vital documents and information.
Writing a mission statement like that feels audacious and I’m not generally someone prone to hyperbole. We didn’t start with that goal, we started somewhere much simpler.
In the summer of 2020, we were asked by a public policy think tank to take on what looked like a very narrow problem: Could we help the cities of New York and Baltimore improve the speed with which people experiencing homelessness moved from temporary shelter to permanent assistive housing by providing them with a digital tool for managing their vital documents?
The problem was an important one to be sure: there are half a million individuals experiencing homelessness in America on any given day and more than two million people in any given year.
In New York City, the average time an individual or family would have to spend in a temporary shelter before they can be rehoused is a year, and the most commonly cited obstacle they face is related to accessing, managing, and submitting their personal vital documents.
This was a problem we knew we could help with.
We built a simple tool to help people securely organize and share their vital documents and information. Along the way, we worked with incredible, passionate people in both cities, and we were joined in the effort by the amazing team at Amazon Web Services. We were supported by various groups including Annie E Casey, Kaiser Permanente, and the Rockefeller Foundation. We also learned a lot and discovered that this problem of vital document management was more widespread than we knew.
Our partners at AWS asked if we wanted to take our vital document management solution to a wider audience. We said “Yes!” and with their help, we met with a wide range of communities and organizations who were interested in hearing about the work we had done. Soon, we were in conversations with national non-profits, local community based organizations, and state and local governments. In each conversation we heard the same thing “This is exactly what we need! Why hasn’t anyone brought this to us before?”
Across our discussions, we heard the same message loud and clear — the problem of access to vital documents and information is endemic; it hinders people in their efforts to get access to services; and as a result, it places an undue administrative burden on nearly everyone in society: people seeking public assistance, nutritional assistance, elder care, children in foster care, neurodiverse communities, individuals going through prison re-entry, the unbanked, refugees & displaced persons, people experiencing disasters, individuals requiring professional licensure, families enrolling in public school, sharing medical records between doctors, leasing a car, buying a house, obtaining a driver’s license.
In the US alone, $180 billion in annual benefits and services are not received by eligible individuals and families because they are unaware of their eligibility or lack the appropriate documentation.
And this problem isn’t just for individuals, it’s bad for governments and organizations as well.
Research shows that government benefit application processors spend roughly 1 hour per application and nearly half of that time is spent on document management — collection, review, and processing. If individuals had their documents safely stored in a platform like Kiip, ready to share them electronically in a secure way, this processing time could be reduced by half, increasing the efficiency of application processing for government agencies by 25%.
The total number of people Kiip could help grew from the 500,000 people experiencing homelessness on any given day to the 2 million who will experience it this year to the tens of millions who were “at risk” and eventually to everyone who interacts with the government, financial services, and health care. And not just here in the US: these issues exist in nearly every corner of the globe for nearly every population.
Digging in, we discovered that there was nobody tackling this problem in a privacy-centric, user-centric way. We saw that we had the experience, knowledge, and ability to solve this problem. We had our mission.
Kiip’s goal is to help the five billion people on the internet improve their lives through better management of their vital documents and information.
That doesn’t feel audacious at all.
