This is an incredibly depressing story:
In the United States, 95% of social safety nets are provided by charity organizations and NGOs, so finding help in a crisis situation can be confusing and distressing. Erine Gray is the founder of Aunt Bertha, a free-to-use online platform that makes it easy for anyone in the US to find and apply for social services — anything from Medicare to food stamps to housing — just by typing in a ZIP code.
The people running this service are amazing and deserve all of our thanks and praise. In fact, the article that description is taken from is fulsome in its praise of the people who run Aunt Bertha. They have done yeoman's work in helping to solve a significant problem in the American safety net:
Unfortunately, there’s no magic source of this data. There’s little bits and pieces of open government data, and it’s pretty poor quality. We start with the very basic information that is available—like IRS charity data—and then we built a series of automated jobs that can check program websites to grab information like hours of operation, email addresses and phone numbers. Every now and then people will send us a list of programs they’ve put together.
There is no reason for this to be the case. NGOs and government services could easily, very easily, be made to report this information to a central repository on a regular basis. Making the application processes work online is more difficult, but hardly insurmountable for any nation that wishes to make it so. That is course is the problem: the complete lack of desire in America to allow the government to help people who are not already filthy rich.
That is why this is depressing: we have created a society where a simple, effective solution is not even attempted because it has to be run by the government. Instead, we are left with heroic efforts at private charity. Unfortunately for everyone involved, private charity cannot come close to replacing the safety net, even when we are discussing something as simple as the distribution of funds and food. Collecting information when no one is required to report it is, of course, a much more complicated task. Making it easy to apply for a myriad of services is when those services are provided by independent organizations of varying technological competency and institutional bias for or against ease of use is, of course, impossible.
The good people of Aunt Bertha are destined to fail. Not because of a lack of effort or dedication or technical skill or organizational ability. Aunt Bertha is destined to fail because she is attempting to perform a job that only Uncle Sam has the power to do. Unfortunately for the country, Uncle Sam is being prevented from taking up the work.