Stanford Volunteers Developing Financial Support Hub

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Courtesy of Jeff Butler

A group of Stanford-affiliated volunteers has set out to develop a tool to make accessing financial support, whether public or private, easier. The project, called Healthier Finance, is part of Stanford’s COVID-19 Response Innovation Lab, in which volunteers from a broad range of disciplines including medicine, business and media hope to collaborate to create technology and systems that are needed during the pandemic.

Healthier Finance is launching next week in the Bay Area, with a particular focus on supporting gig workers and tipped workers who have been particularly hard-hit by the economic downturn brought on by the new coronavirus and may have more difficulty accessing resources like unemployment benefits. The site is designed to quickly identify a user’s primary needs and give them, if not an exhaustive set of instructions for how to begin, at least a place to start and a plain-language overview of what is available and how to get it, said Jeff Butler, an incoming student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a volunteer with the Healthier Finance project.

“It’s daunting, having all of these resources, and only having Google to kind of wade through it. And so what we’ve done as we’ve talked to a bunch of industry experts, and done a lot of research ourselves, found out what are the highest impact programs that are available and the resources that are out there. And then our website, Healthier Finance, will actually help tailor and personalize these resources based on your specific needs.” — Jeff Butler

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Screen capture of the Response Innovation Lab.

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