on Everine: digital empathy in a laminated world.

For years now, people in crisis email me begging for me to find some help for them.

It’s hard to not be moved by those emails. It’s hard to not immediately say, “Yes I will personally do the research and find you anything that can help you, because your pain needs to be felt and cared for”.

When people are facing impossible, stressful, and hard conditions: it’s human to want to provide support in whatever way we can.

For a couple of months this year, I worked as a temporary worker for a county in Oregon doing data entry for a crucial homelessness problem As a government worker, I was absolutely fascinated by how all of the systems behind our social safety nets were interconnected, yet so hard to get into.

Even our own team members had tried to apply for the programs they were processing applications for, and didn’t even know where to start. These experiences and beyond have led me to realize the internet is very full of information, but it’s not always helpful.

Our internet is a home filled with many haunted rooms, but it’s also where we can find digital portals to some of the most amazing programs and tools for our most vulnerable people.

Increasingly so, our world feels almost plasticized away from human pain. We’re meant to ignore it, donate to charities, and turn away. We become laminated from the people who need help: they’re not human, they’re hobos, junkies, looking for attention, or needing to get used to the real world.

But everyone needs help. It’s not an us vs. them situation, and someday — we may find ourselves on the other side of the glass. Anyone can become homeless, addicted, in an abusive situation, and more. Anyone can end up needing care, and finding it hard to get it.

Especially in the case of people who are disabled, they may not be able to leave the house to talk to a caseworker, or have the energy to call a bunch of referral lines to find the one program they need.

I’m also thinking of people who work long hours and come home to support their family don’t want to spend hours researching, especially parents who spend their time working, caring, and barely get a moment to themselves, yet alone time to deep dive and compare and contrast.

There’s so many scenarios in which someone wants to find help, but they just don’t know where to start, or can’t start.

The system to find benefits, programs, and funding is riddled with hoops to jump through. I wrote extensively about my own experience trying to navigate our healthcare system, and the non-profit programs for autistic people trying to achieve homeownership.

Long story short, if we want people to get help, we need to make it easier.

The things that give me the most hope for our world are the incredible non-profits who break through the laminate, directly serving the people who that some want to look away from.

For example, Urban Alchemy is an incredible non-profit that monitors public spaces and who I often see engaging with people outside of my daily visits to the San Francisco library next to City Hall, an area infamous in the Bay.

Their mission works because they treat the people who are seen as otherwise disruptive and worth ignoring as humans who need conversation, love, and someone to step in to see how they’re doing.

There’s so many other programs that I want to highlight that are accessible to people all over the US through their phones right now:

• GiveASmile, a charity that provides free jaw reconstruction surgery to domestic violence victims
• VineNetwork, a platform that alerts abuse or crime victims when their offenders are released from jail
• Chayn, a global network of information about gender based violence in a BUNCH of different languages.

And many, many more.

Given Astra’s digital nature, it made sense for us to have some kind of large-scale database or other tool where we captured these portals, for anyone to reach whenever they need it.

That’s Everine. Every resource within Everine is a testament to the amount of empathy waiting to be found. And I’m beyond hopeful that Everine will help people find it.

It also stands to mention that we’re on the edge of a big cliff at Astra: for the last couple of years, we’ve focused on building scalable infrastructure for our resources that would allow us to serve more people, faster than ever.

The culmination of that 2+ year effort is in Aureus, our giant open source design system. Everine is not only our first web app, but it’s also the ‘sacrificial pancake’, and our first launch with Aureus.

Launching Everine is going to help us get more eyes on more bugs and quirks to solve before we launch Verena in 2 weeks.

Considering Verena and Aetheria have thousands of users, it felt like the right move to launch a smaller project that was less dangerous if Aureus had blocking bugs or other weird issues that we have yet to find.

Everine has existed in some form or another throughout Astra for years, and was slated to begin development end of 2020 as Zenith. Although it was put on the backburner for Aureus, throughout those 3 years, it feels more clear than ever where its’ place is.

Whenever issues happen in our encoded world, we find resources for them. Below every tweet calling for help is a suicide hotline, for every political issue a petition.

It’s a natural progression to build a database where these resources live, and eventually where they can be reviewed by the people who use them, put into shareable lists, and be integrated into content and articles written by experts about dealing with these issues.

Everine wants to break through the laminate, to give those people who need it a head start, and to be there if you ever need it.