Why We’re Building Kinder
I’m a transplant from a small town, and LA can seem really impersonal. It’s great to see a project bring neighborliness to a big city ❤️
- Emily, Kinder user
I’m Hunter Hillman, and my brother Spencer and I are building Kinder. This is our story.
Where we come from
We grew up on a boarding school campus in rural Tennessee. As you might imagine, daily life on a high school campus was somewhat different from the average childhood experience.
We went to the dining hall for dinner every evening, where we sat at long tables and ate with our friends and neighbors; in the evenings we played outside on the quad with the other kids.
If our mom needed to borrow sugar, we ran over to another teacher’s house to grab it.
Our father ran the adjacent dormitory, which housed twelve young men who spent the better part of the year on our 1-square-mile campus. What we remember most vividly is the sense of community which permeated every part of our lives.
A crisis
Over a number of years, our father developed severe peripheral neuropathy, a progressive disability that made it increasingly hard for him to walk or to use his hands.
With Spencer across the country, me in college, and our brother Jordan working out of state, our father — now divorced and living on his own in a new town — had little support as his needs increased and he became homebound and socially isolated.
His health declined precipitously, and he passed away in 2016.
After taking time to regroup personally and professionally, we asked each other a simple question:
What could have gone differently for Dad, and for us?
Our answer is Kinder.
Kinder is a platform for creating trust in neighborhoods
We are centered around a pay-it-forward marketplace for simple goods and services, and we rebuild community support networks by prioritizing one-on-one and small group interactions, preferably offline.
In-person relationships are critical to mental and physical health, and existing structures often fail to help people build meaningful relationships with those around them.
Our mission is to strengthen and recreate the tight, authentic community bonds that we experienced growing up.
Already, hundreds of people in Los Angeles are using Kinder to share garden produce, find conversation partners for language learning, make music together, and more.
Moreover, Kinder is creating authentic relationships in neighborhoods: half of all “asks” and “offers” on the platform have led to in-person meetups.
We encourage a give-first mentality: users have offered free computer repair, hair care, and more because they know that their neighbors will return the favor.
In the coming months and years, we will become the “rails” for a revival of hyperlocal, online-to-offline village-style economies.
We are building Kinder because we have strong conviction about the world in which we want to live.
Families are increasingly dispersed, and urban life has changed the nature of communities all across the country.
We are building a world where people not only know their neighbors, but interact with them in a positive way.
We are building a world where caregivers, parents, older adults, and people of all stripes can turn to the people around them in good times and bad.
We are building a Kinder world.
Want to stay in touch?
We are currently in Hollywood, CA and are expanding rapidly. If you think your community needs Kinder, add your name to our waitlist!
Thanks for your support,
Team Kinder
