In college, Shannon worked with a local women’s shelter. Every morning at 5 a.m., her job was to help women go through mountains of paperwork to get their kids in school, get a new driver’s license, or change their identity with the state. But that didn’t sit well with Shannon.

Was there no simpler, easier process that could be implemented here? After all, one thing tech is really great at is minimizing and streamlining painfully manual processes like filling out binders of paperwork. And she was eager about the burgeoning potential of tech across the U.S.

“This was the beginning of my career, thinking: ‘How would you fix these painful processes?’...Today, I’m solving the binder problem I had in the 90s.”

Today, she’s helping entire teams of people solve problems exactly like this, through her work at Fast Forward. For example, one of their graduates, Immigration Help was started to ensure people can navigate the entire immigration process without a lawyer—goodbye binders! 

However, the work Shannon does at Fast Forward, alongside cofounder Kevin Barenblat and an amazing staff, is the culmination of an extensive career journey. Before starting the accelerator, she spent years working alongside other organizations like the W. Haywood Burns Institute and Spark. 

Spark, specifically, was true startup environment that taught her many important lessons. She learned that there’s massive power in the aggregate support behind an idea, it’s crucial to include community voices into the practice changes you wish to make, and learning the hard way isn’t always the best way. Although it’s certainly still effective. 

“What I loved about [Fast Forward] is, it’s the stuff I wish I had when we were starting Spark…I had to learn everything the hard way at Spark. If we could speed up that process for other founders, we could get to ‘more good,’ faster.”

And therein lies the central thesis of Fast Forward: see the best tech applied to the world’s biggest social problems. What makes it special is the singular focus on tech nonprofits and the type of founder they want in their program.  

“We look for founders with lived experience with the problem. They understand it better than we do, and better than large institutions who think they can build an app and solve everything. Is it burning a hole in their heart where they have to fix it? That’s who we invest in.”

They also look for other qualities like grit, understanding, solution size, and go to market strategies. Once accepted into the program, Fast Forward gives their cohort funding, access to tech mentors, one-on-one coaching, and access to a network of other founders. It’s amazing to see what some have done with this opportunity.

Asset Hub is a Fast Forward graduate, founded by someone in the Oakland Mayor’s office. Her constituents were going to Reddit to navigate public benefits in Oakland—she’s creating a tech nonprofit that will solve this issue and steer people to helpful resources. Sorry, Reddit, but you’re not a credible source. 

Another founder, Michelle Brown, was a reading teacher in rural Mississippi, but her classroom had no books. She also had a dozen different reading levels in the classroom, which made purchasing books for everyone difficult. 

She took her wedding presents, sold them, and put the cash toward the first version of Common Lit, a free literacy platform with curricula developed by reading teachers. Today, Common Lit serves 20 million students. 

“That’s what philanthropy should be doing. Philanthropy is the ultimate risk capital, and we never treat it that way. The money has been spent and it’s not coming back. So, you should spend it on something fantastic, like a dream that you had imagined that wouldn’t exist in the world without it.”

It's this kind of attitude that draws Cause & Purpose to startups. We love the joy that comes with the hard work, innovation, and camaraderie inherent in launching a new venture. To date, we've spent time featuring established leaders and mature organizations on the podcast.

While that will always be part of our core, we're going to expand the scope of our content to include founders in the early phases of launching organizations. Among the first of these "startup" episodes will be features on Karen Underwood from Verano Health, and Lisa Wong from Almost Fund. Both of them are graduates from the Fast Forward program—stay tuned for more!

‍