Built w/Communities (not just for them).

There are roughly 56 million U.S. households who earn above the federal poverty line and below the cost of living. The United Way calls them ALICE, Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. They’re working. They’re paying taxes. And they sit in the seam of a safety net that wasn’t designed for them: too "well-off" for most benefits, too thin-margined to absorb a missed shift, a medical bill, an expired document, a benefits cliff.

This is the ALICE Threshold, the cliff edge between poverty programs and stability. It is the largest under-served population in the United States. No one has built tools designed for it: no record they can own, no shared place for the people who serve them, no public systems that fit. What exists was built either for households below the poverty line or for households comfortably above the cost of living. The middle has nothing.

Zion is what the middle looks like when you build it deliberately.

The company response

We build three things, in sequence, each earning the right to build the next:

LP Account, a record the household owns and controls. The family decides who can see each part and can take that access back. Case managers and partner organizations work from the same record the family sees, so no one re-enters the same income, ID, and paperwork twice. This is the foundation the other two products are built on.

OutPosts, a shared online place built on top of LP Account, where partner organizations, families, and case managers meet. The core service is free forever; paid features never put a price on eligibility, documents, or continuity of care.

Oasis, a later stage where practitioners and community businesses can earn on the platform, and where a 5–10% commission funds public goods inside it. Open, ready-to-adopt connections let the cities, counties, and foundations that already serve these households plug in.

The trust architecture

The mission cannot be sold. That one sentence holds up everything else. Zion is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation bound by a public Charter that sets hard limits on every part of the product, no tracking, no manipulative design, no paywall on the core service. The Charter can be enforced, and any breach is visible to the public.

The company’s purpose is held by the Mission Trust, a standalone legal entity, rather than by a board majority. A Trust Advisory Board, including community representation, ratifies any change to that purpose. A future acquirer cannot strip the mission out by buying a controlling stake, because the controlling stake of purpose is not for sale.

The Charter, the Mission Trust instrument, and the No Core Paywall Pledge are all posted publicly. We tell investors and foundation officers the same thing we tell the press and the public: read the constraints. If they don’t hold up, the company doesn’t work.

Why this, why now

Three shifts have made this possible. First, letting people own and control their own records is finally practical: storage is cheap, nearly everyone has a smartphone, and the tools for granting and revoking access are mature. Second, the paperwork burden on the safety net is at a generational high, and government is openly looking for partners who can carry some of it. Third, both venture and foundation capital are looking for investments tied to real outcomes, and a Charter-bound PBC held in a Mission Trust is the most credible answer we can offer.

The next step is straightforward. Read the Theory of Change. Read the Charter. If the structure looks right, talk to us. The data room is shared on request, there’s nothing behind a form on this site, and nothing in the data room that would surprise you given what’s public.

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SOURCES · ALICE methodology from United Way / United For ALICE. Household counts from the 2024 ALICE Report. Federal/state benefits expenditure figures from the most recent Congressional Research Service compilation. All figures footnoted on the Theory of Change page.