Help shouldn't be hard. Anywhere.

SNAP already delivers about 93–94 cents of every dollar directly to food. That's one of the most efficient programs in government. But even then, people miss out — not because they don't qualify, but because finding, applying, and tracking benefits takes time, paperwork, and know-how that not everyone has.

FEED. removes the navigation overhead. It helps people find programs they qualify for, fills in what it already knows about them, and tracks where every application stands. That means community money and energy go to food, care, and connection — not to getting lost in the system.

To be clear: FEED. doesn't hand out benefits. It helps people find and apply for the programs that already exist — and makes sure fewer fall through the cracks.

As More Perfect Union's reporting documents, a small circle of billionaires and tech CEOs is building software that increasingly runs government functions — a shift the reporting argues is designed to answer to shareholders, not voters. Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, has marketed itself as an "operating system" for government; OpenGov, co-founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, sells budgeting and data systems that public agencies run on. In my view — and as that reporting makes the case — these are part of a longer effort to replace accountable, democratic government with privatized, automated, corporate-owned systems.

You can see what corporate-owned infrastructure does to ordinary people in your own electric bill. A national investigation into data centers and electric bills found they've become a leading driver of rising costs: in the PJM grid — 13 states, 65 million people — last year's capacity auction jumped 800%, and PJM's own market monitor attributed 63% of that increase to data centers. Utilities pass those costs on to households. When infrastructure is built to serve corporations, the bill tends to land on communities.

The model that fixes this already exists — it's called a co-op. As More Perfect Union's reporting on the cooperative model documents, Drivers Coop Colorado pays its driver-owners two to three times what Uber does on the same ride, at the same or lower fares, and Nebraska ranchers built their own state-of-the-art meatpacking plant after a corporate processor left them stranded. It works for technology, too — Wikipedia, governed by its own community, has stayed free and community-run for fifteen years. Cooperatively-owned alternatives cut out the billionaire middleman without cutting quality.

FEED. is that model for mutual-aid technology. If AI and data tools are going to reshape how communities get help, then communities should build and own those tools — not rent them from the corporations automating us out of the decision. FEED. is community-owned mutual-aid technology: the same kind of capability the giants sell to governments, put back in the hands of the people who use it — a nonprofit in formation, never for sale, never for profit.