The poor are not
a market.
They are neighbours.
Everyone is searching for the same thing: something that doesn't move. Christian or atheist, president or peasant, all of us are looking for somewhere secure to stand.
So you build something a person can turn to the moment they feel lost, and you fill it with the one thing that doesn't run out: each other.
Love God with everything you are.
All your time, your thoughts, your hope, and your actions.
Love your neighbour as yourself.
When you give to the poor, you give to God. Charity is love with its sleeves rolled up.
And when the person you helped wants to give something back, you let them. Iron sharpens iron. Nobody here is only a giver, and nobody is only a case. It's Acts, chapter four: a community that held everything in common, so that no one among them was in need. It isn't a program run for them. It's something they run for each other.
“UMI is a simple, almost-effortless network built so you can indulge in your neighbour — with love, with charity, with faith, with strength, and with a pure understanding.”
I built the first version of this because I was tired of watching love get turned into logistics. Good people were ready to help, and there was no dignified way for the help to find the need.
So the rule underneath everything is consent, not surveillance. Your community's information stays in your community's hands. The things that could really hurt someone are encrypted, each with its own key: a case note, the identity behind a request, the name of the neighbour someone was asking for. When a person asks to be forgotten, we destroy that key, and those words are gone for good.
Everyday things are still held in plain text, like a display name, an email, or the title of an ask. I'd rather tell you where that line falls than let one word cover for everything behind it. A promise only belongs on this page if the code keeps it. That's the reason this exists.
We started with a parish notice-board because you have to start with something real, something you can point at and say, here, look, it works.
Jasiah Williams
Founder & Steward, United Moral Infrastructure
United Moral Infrastructure is a non-profit being established as a 501(c)(3). We hold no candidates and take no party. We steward an open standard and the communities that choose to use it. We're accountable to them, plainly, with our books open.
What we believe · Lake 0, the heart