<center>History</center>

Hello, my name is Stefan Densmore and I am the founder of United Resource Connection. In 1996 I was working as a community mental health case manager for the largest social service agency in the Cincinnati tristate area. In addition to counseling, part of my job was to be a resource guru and navigator, helping struggling individuals and families find supportive community resources, such as housing, food & clothing, healthcare and transportation assistance, to name a few. This involved navigating a complex social service landscape, attempting to communicate and collaborate with multiple siloed organizations.

One of the significant challenges to this work was knowledge sharing. Resource availability and application protocols were constantly changing, with no heads-up. This was a three-fold problem, one part having to do with the rapid turnover of these financially strapped community service organizations. When community resource manuals where printed, they were 13 inches thick with 2/3s of the information incorrect within a month of printing. Another part having to do with rapid turnover in these organizations’ staffing, and then also a part having to do with the balkanization of the organizations– how siloed they were

of it being due to staff turnover– there were no mechanisms in place to effectively transfer the information that staff learned during their tenure. the most individuals doing the job were young and didn’t know the area resources well, and by the time they did, they were moving on to higher paying jobs, taking their knowledge with them, without any in-house mechanism to retain the knowledge they had acquired

Another significant challenge was the balkanization of social service agencies– they each had their own territories and specialties, and didn’t share information with one another very well, if at all. They were in effect very siloed, unable to effectively collaborate, which further .

I was among the first generation of kids to be raised with computers in the home, and had learned a little bit about programming along the way, so some technical solutions to these problems readily occurred to me coming up through the ranks. Basically I made pdfs of the flyers on the bulletin boards, and posted them on the website. Prior to the internet, social workers would share information with one another, inhouse, by physically posting flyers on a bulletin board in the office hallway for one another to see. While helpful for those in the office, the approach was very siloed, there was virtually no interagency communication.

In the early 2000s, accessing the internet with your cellphone was a very new thing, and the technology was in its infancy. The internet was not interactive but rather read-only. You couldn’t upload documents. The phones couldn’t handle pictures very well, so most of the experience was just text. I created a website, called cybercasemanager.com [see wayback machine], that served as an online bulletin board, for sharing resource information: application forms for patient assistance, food pantry locations and hours, job and family services application forms.

It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal now, but in the early 2000s, no one had done this before, so it was a big deal. It made the job of social workers easier, as they had access to resources via their phone, and retained information. A resource directory was published annually by the United Way, as a book, which was about a 12 inches thick. However 2/3s of the information was out-of-date by the time it was printed, as rapid change in the availability of resources has long been a stable dynamic of the social service landscape. Websites could be quickly edited, even daily, as resource availability changed, so this was a significant improvement over storing the information in physical books. Cybercasemanager was the first website to specialize in social service resource information sharing online.

Most social service agencies could not afford an IT department, so I hosted their application forms for them, enabling their clients to download the application forms. I did this for the Hamilton County Job and Family Services, as well, before they were able to do it for themselves. And I did all this for free.

Cybercasemanager became more interactive alongside an ever more interactive internet. By 2010 boots-on-the-ground social workers were able to take photos of physical flyers distributed by a local food pantry, and upload them to the website for greater visibility. With boots-on-the ground, they often knew more about changes in application protocols and service availability than administrative staff did, and were thus best suited to rapidly share the information, more so than a disconnected IT department.

I was serving as a community case manager by day, and operating cybercasemanager at night. I was spreading the word about the free website wherever I went, was being called a saint of social workers by some. I developed some marketing materials, and started reaching out to the leadership of numerous social service agencies, to train their frontline case management staff on how to use the website to obtain and share information with one another.

In 2015 I decided to rebrand cybercasemanager to better communicate its mission. The new name became United Resource Connection. I was concurrently working on a masters degree in organizational leadership, focussing on principles of employee-ownership and democratic organizational governance. I used these principles to draw up organizational bylaws for United Resource Connection, recruited like-minded individuals to form a board of directors, and filed for nonprofit status, which was granted by the IRS in 2017.

By this time I had enough of a vision to be dangerous to myself and my family. I decided to cash the meager retirement funds I had acquired as a social worker, to fund full time work on the further development of United Resource Connection. My thinking was that the organization would eventually scale large enough that charging a minor fee for the service would be enough to refund the investment, and support a number of paid employees. I significantly misjudged the mechanics and timeline of this possibility, and within a couple years had maxed out the credit line of the organization, which I had personally guaranteed, and had a significant attrition of board members, disillusioned with the financial sustainability of the project.

My family made donations to the organization that helped get it out of debt, and I was able to recruit more board members, one of whom was Trent Lobdell. Trent was working on a project to map resource locations, prior to a similar service being developed by google.

The idea occurred to me to identify the 10 most impoverished locations in the U.S., and create a local branch of URC in each of those locations. We could send a national broadcast to each of these locations, highlighting national resource availability and application protocols, to serve those in the region. Operations of these local branches would be turned over to local volunteers who had boots-on-the-ground in these locations– enabling them to increase visibility of local resources, while we provided the IT department.

Our first task was to identify which 10 locations in the U.S. were the most impoverished. As Trent and I researched this we found to our surprise that weren’t really any good measures of this out there. For instance, if we looked at median income per capa , college campuses would skew the results, as you have a high population with the majority of this population not working. So on paper this looks like a poor area, when in fact, these students have significantly better housing and food resources then the demographic we were trying to identify.

Trent developed an algorithm, [insert description] that allowed us to do this more accurately. …and we identified our ten locations. In this process we also learned that not every location has a zip code, that in fact, some places are given the designation CDP (census designated place) rather than being assigned a zip code. …And so in 2018, we launched 10 rural branches across the country. These included Goofy Ridge, IL; Cedar Crest, OK; Deokee, VA; Florence, IN; Kinlock, MO; Steamboat, AZ; Goodyear Village, AZ; Drysdale, AZ; Westly, CA; and Tecolote, NM.

During the COVID pandemic there was an increased recognition of the importance for interagency communication and collaboration technologies.

The newsfeed seemed to be the greater hook. Over the years I had written literally thousands of articles. Many of these were outdated and archived within a year of publishing, but some were more stable resources, such that they could be republished annually, with only minor editing and research required.

In 2022 I recognized that many people were turning to podcasts as their preferred way of receiving news. I wanted to offer a way for social service news to be delivered in this fashion as well, and began research on how to make this happen. My preference was to use humans, but I wasn’t financially able to support this. I found I could use text-to-speech technology to automatically create a podcast episode for each article I wrote, and do this in multiple languages. I found I could do this very cheaply, and registered “Cincinnati Social Service News” on all the podcast platforms. National news feed for Social Service News Network, for national broadcasting.

The newsfeed quickly became the most popular service we were offering, as social workers could listen to the newsfeed on their way to work.

Partnering with municipalities, as first responders are often the first to encounter those individuals and families struggling the most.

Partnering with universities to provide training and internships.