Nonprofit Startup Johego Seeks To Close Gaps In Social Safety Net

ST. LOUIS, MO — For many people in St. Louis and across the country, the social safety net has wide gaps. And for the fifth of St. Louis residents living below the poverty line, or the thousands facing homelessness, drug addiction or mental health issues, those gaps can seem like gulfs.

A nonprofit tech startup called Johego hopes to change that. By creating an app to aggregate and verify data about medical and social services, Johego founder Michael Kehoe hopes to make connecting people with the services they need as easy as looking up movie times or hailing an Uber.

"Across the United States, there are approximately 23 million professionals who, as a regular or occasional part of their work, connect vulnerable populations with the services they need, typically relying on word-of-mouth referrals, pen-and-paper lists and hours upon hours of Googling to do so," Kehoe says in a video previewing the app.

The name Johego is derived from an Iroquois word meaning "what we live on," which refers to the symbiotic relationship between corn, beans and squash when planted together. Often called the Three Sisters, these staples of Native American agriculture each provide benefits to the others: corn provides something for beans to climb, beans fertilize the soil, and squash leaves block sunlight from reaching the ground, making it harder for weeds to grow.

"As interesting as these biological insights may be, their philosophical implications were, for me, even more profound: with a little careful planning, these plants grow considerably better together than they do separately," Kehoe writes. "After all, that is the function of human community itself: we organize ourselves into groups, in large part, because we believe we can build a better life together than on our own."

He says he hopes police officers, social workers, medical professionals and others can similarly work together using Johego to connect their clients with the services they need — all with the tap of a few buttons.

While in the past this time-consuming work has been limited by time and shoe leather, Johego uses code to comb government databases for the information it needs, plugging gaps with freelancers who are hired to verify information using scripted phone calls. Whereas, according to nonprofit Benetech, collecting and verifying the information can cost as much as $140 per provider due to widespread duplication of efforts, Johego says its methodology has been able to cut that number by around 95 percent.

By gathering as much information as possible on the backend and streamlining over-the-phone interactions, the company has added more than 3,300 social and medical service providers to its directory since its launch.

Supported through a partnership with Families and Communities Together (FACT), a Hannibal-based coalition of social service providers, Johego released the beta version of its software in May 2017. That initial release focused on six counties in northeast Missouri, but version 2.0, released the following November, has since added 18 additional counties, all across the state.

Version 2.0 allows users to search ten times as many providers, send emails or text messages to clients, request Uber or Lyft rides, and also adds a browser application in addition to Android and iOS apps, the company says.

The updated software was largely made possible by a $270,000 grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health, an independent philanthropic health foundation. Johego also won $20,000 through Washington University's Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition in 2017, and was the following year accepted into StartX, a Stanford-affiliated business accelerator ranked among the top three in the world.

Kehoe says the company is focused on building out its sales pipeline so that it can begin expanding into new jurisdictions.

"Now that Johego has validated a data pipeline that is 95 percent more efficient than traditional methods, we have a unique opportunity to pursue mission-aligned earned revenue contracts with Medicaid-managed care organizations, hospital systems, 2-1-1 operators, and other entities that have a financial interest in more cheaply and reliably connecting their clients with social and medical services," he explained.

To learn more about Johego, download the app, donate or volunteer, visit johego.org.