I saw the failure.
So I am building the alternative.

I chose vanlife—working from the road—to escape the constraints of an office. I didn't realize it would expose me to so many people living on the fringe. Not in theory. Not as a weekend volunteer. In real proximity—on the road, in vans, in border towns, in places where the line between "functional" and "discarded" is thin and unforgiving.

I also lived in Salt Lake City, an urban area where I witnessed the problem go from rare to prolific. The numbers are fuzzy, but over 2,200 people experiencing homelessness locally—part of roughly 771,000 nationwide in 2024. These aren't just statistics. They're neighbors.

When you live that way, you stop seeing "the homeless" as a category. You see people. Men and women who had lives, skills, families, careers—and then one event, one medical bill, one bad stretch, and the floor disappeared. And children. Homeless children in the wealthiest nation on earth—it should be unthinkable, yet it happens every day.

What shocked me wasn’t just the suffering. It was the inefficiency. The waste. The cruelty baked into systems that are supposedly designed to help. I watched people get bounced hundreds of miles between agencies they couldn’t afford to reach. Services existed on paper but vanished in reality.

So I’m building VideoBackedMoney. Not as a charity. Not as a platform. As infrastructure. A system where support is direct, visible, and human. Where money goes to a person, not a pipeline. Where proof isn’t performative—it’s structural.

I am not interested in managing poverty. I am interested in ending it, one person at a time.

Why "VBM.CASH"?

VideoBackedMoney is the protocol: The mechanism of using video to verify impact.
VBM.CASH is the instrument: The direct, liquid asset that puts power in people's hands.

Let's fix this.