Zion, the Company

The center of everything Zion builds is a simple idea. Everything we accomplish must be Built w/Communities (not just for them). When I founded this company, I purposefully chose the name and structure to bind our commitment to the communities we serve. Zion Datum Public Benefit Corporation. Each word, a commitment, each word a brick to keep us accountable:

• Zion — a paradise built here on earth by us, where that divine spark shall dwell with us.
• Datum — that which was given, as we owe each other a paradise, as we shall give that paradise freely, built on the singular piece of data, a singular fact given of ourselves.
• Public — for paradise to be real we cannot go it alone, we must bring ourselves to the community light, so that we may be redeemed and may redeem others.
• Benefit — what we build must be built for the benefit of those it will serve; if it is for their goodwill or benefit it must be built with their hands and voices.
• Corporation — grounded in the legal structures of our environment, a legal, accountable, and practical vehicle to bring about this mission.

As written in my first letter, the reality of the coming storm requires an honest accounting of the challenges we are all going to face in the coming years. Comfort should be gained in knowing we are all facing the same flood. We at Zion share your fears — will we have enough, will this paycheck stretch, will everything I built be taken from me.

At Zion, we wrestle with these fears, personally and professionally, day in and day out. To support communities, we have created Lifetime Portable Accounts (an LP Account) that allow each community member to have safe, secure storage of their most important information, free for their lifetime.

The Missing Layer — the LP Account

When you strip away the name, the LP Account is each person or household’s easily accessible copies of their key information that social, health, and workforce systems use to make decisions about your life.

Today, that information about you is scattered. A clinic has one piece. A state agency has another. An old employer has a third. A housing program has a fourth. None of them holds the whole picture, none of them is yours, and every time you need help you are sent to reassemble the picture by hand, from scratch, under a deadline.

The LP Account flips that. It gives you one place that is yours, where your records live, that you carry from situation to situation the way you carry a wallet. Unlike a folder or pulling the records from each provider each time you interact, the LP Account is updated on both the Local Partner end and on the community member end. The data stored on the LP Account stays up to date, is verifiable and portable, and most important, is revocable.

How LP Account Works

As a member-controlled data layer, a key tenant of the design is consent by the member. Unlike the current structure, individuals consent to the provider’s policy regarding all different usages of their data. In our current world where a user’s data is a major commodity, it makes sense why large corporations are racing to wall off their user data and simultaneously sell the same to advertisers or data brokers.

At Zion we believe that if we are going to have a truly equitable civil society in the age of artificial intelligence and automation, you — the regular American — should decide who can see your information. Your consent should determine which piece of information is accessible to which provider, for what purpose, and for how long. Not a single all-or-nothing checkbox buried in a terms-of-service page, but real, specific, revocable permission. You can grant a clinic access to what it needs and nothing more. You can take that access back. The second is the audit log: a plain, readable record of every time anyone looked at your information, visible to you. If someone opened your file, you can see it. Most of us have never once been able to say that about our own records.

What does this change, in an ordinary life? It changes proving yourself from a burden you carry alone into something you only have to do once. Instead of nine front desks each demanding a fresh stack of documents, you arrive with your information already in hand and already trustworthy. A benefit renewal stops being a trap that springs when a letter goes to an old address, because the information needed to renew is already there, already yours, already current. The cliff that families fall off — losing help not because they became ineligible but because the paperwork failed — gets a guardrail.

For the providers of services, the LP Account folds neatly into your existing data stack. Our value proposition is that once you have consent, data degradation shouldn’t hinder your ability to deliver services. The LP Account provides operationally beneficial data updating, back-up, and discoverable capabilities, including for the growing ALICE population.

Zion’s OutPosts — a place to find your community

The records layer is the foundation, but it does not bring about community. It is not a place to receive services, a place to bring your frustrations and successes, all necessary for the success and trust of the LP Account model. In furtherance of this, we at Zion are also building a sister application that sits on top of the consent-spine of the LP Account. We call it OutPosts.

In the last post I made a point I want to return to: the safety net, for all its broken plumbing, already runs through the institutions people trust most — congregations, libraries, food pantries, community health centers, recovery groups, workforce offices. OutPosts is the place where a household and those local organizations find each other, and where help can actually flow among community members and the providers.

When someone opens OutPosts they will find their community, and the trusted organizations validated by the same community. Local partners can share what they offer, who they serve, how to reach them. Community members can easily source community supports, directions, and in-person and virtual supports. And when you decide to connect with a local partner, you are not handing them a blank slate and starting the whole exhausting story over again. Through the same consent layer, you can let them see exactly what they need to help you, and nothing else. The library, the clinic, the pantry all become doorways into the wider system instead of one more front desk demanding fresh paperwork.

That is the whole design philosophy in one sentence: meet people where they already are, with the institutions they already trust, and let the individuals and households carry their own proof. We are not trying to replace the community web that already holds people up. We are trying to give the community webs of support consistent infrastructure worthy of it, allowing for greater impact by paring back administrative burden on both ends.

The Promises We Keep

I acknowledge that a records layer that holds your most sensitive information is a frightening thing in the wrong hands. Even with the best intentions, this is still a difficult thing to trust won’t be abused. And because maintaining the trust of the community and our users is paramount, we at Zion want you to hold us accountable the same exact way you hold those in your community accountable.

Don’t take our word for it. Make us demonstrate that we are staying true to our values. To enshrine our commitments, we built the promises into the structure of the company itself, where a future executive or a future investor cannot quietly undo them.

As a public benefit corporation our commitments have real legal form that obligates the company, by law, to weigh its public mission alongside profit. On top of that, our proposed charter carries a set of commitments that are deliberately hard to remove once adopted. We do not hand user data to data brokers or advertisers. The core features of the LP Account — the record, the consent controls, the ability to read and carry and delete your own information — are free, for everyone, forever.

And because promises need an enforcer, we built two into our proposed charter. There is a Trust Advisory Board with real veto power over decisions that would touch the mission — a body that will check our work, make sure there isn’t mission drift, and, if we ever needed, can stop the company from violating the above promises. Secondly, we wish to create Mission Trust Shares, which catalyze philanthropic support in an independent trust that holds a permanent stake in Zion and exists for one purpose: to keep the mission intact. The point of all of this is simple. The protections should not depend on the founder staying good, or the next CEO sharing my values, or investors being patient. Our promises today should hold whether or not anyone is watching. Trust that depends on goodwill is not trust. It is hope. We are not asking for the benefit of the doubt, but rather for you to weigh our fruits.

On the Horizon @ Zion

I will be honest that our ambition does not stop at records and benefits, because human beings are not only the problems they need solved. It would be easy to end on the vision and let it glow. I would rather tell you the truth about where we stand, because trust is built that way and not the other.

Over time, OutPosts is meant to grow into something larger — a genuine community space, what we have started calling the Oasis: a place where local artists, journalists, organizers, and creators can reach the people around them, supported rather than exploited by the platform they stand on. That is a longer story for another post. I mention it only so you know the destination we are walking toward.

We are early. We are a small team building carefully in a hard environment. What we have are pilots, seeking a first cohort of local organizations, the first families carrying their own records, and even our first state partnership. We have a great deal still to prove, and some of what we try will not work the first time. When that happens, we are going to say so. Every year we will publish an honest account of what we set out to do, what we achieved, and — in its own clearly labeled section — what we promised and did not yet reach.

The invitation, again

The missing layer cannot be built by a company handing a finished product to communities. It has to be built with them — anchored in the libraries and congregations and clinics that people already trust, governed in part by the people whose lives it describes, owned in a way that lasts. We at Zion can build the technology. We can iterate and pivot to ensure that it fits your needs from a household and provider perspective. The trust, however, we can only earn in the months and years — sprouting in real places, alongside neighbors and the institutions already doing the work.

The emergency is real, and the worst case is a road we could genuinely end up on. But none of it is a destiny. The missing layer is buildable, the community to build it already exists, and the moment to start is now. If you lead one of those trusted local institutions, if you work inside one of these systems and know exactly where it breaks, or if you simply believe that proving you need help should not itself be a hardship — there is a place for you in this. We would be glad to build it with you.

— Dimitri, Founder & CEO, Zion Datum Public Benefit Corporation