Why I'm building this

I'm a veteran. When you leave the military, you lose the structure that told you where to go and who had your back. What replaces it is a stack of systems that don't talk to each other, and you become the one carrying the paperwork between them.

I watched people I served with tell their story to one office after another. I watched good organizations do real work and get no credit for it, because on paper their results looked the same as everyone else's. And I watched the veteran get counted in a report without anyone asking whether the help actually came.

So I'm building the rails I wish we'd had. The veteran owns their record. The systems coordinate around them instead of through them. Nothing counts until the person who received it says it happened. And over time, their own sense of how their life is going tells us what actually helped.

The standard that holds all of this lives at Last1.org, an independent nonprofit, because I don't want anyone, including me, grading their own homework.

There are veterans that need this. That's the whole reason.

Ryan Curry