Built w/Communities (not just for them).

There are roughly 56 million U.S. households who earn above the federal poverty line and below the cost of living. The United Way calls them ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. They’re working. They’re paying taxes. And they sit in the seam of a safety net that wasn’t designed for them: too "well-off" for most benefits, too thin-margined to absorb a missed shift, a medical bill, an expired document, a benefits cliff.

This is the ALICE Threshold — the cliff edge between poverty programs and stability. It is the largest under-served population in the United States, and it has no purpose-built record layer, no purpose-built community platform, no purpose-built civic infrastructure. The systems that exist were built either for the population below the poverty line or for the population well above the cost of living. The middle has nothing.

Zion is what the middle looks like when you build it deliberately.

The company response

We build three things, in sequence, each earning the right to build the next:

LP Account — a consumer-controlled record layer. The household owns the records. The household grants consent. Case managers and partner organizations work the same record set the member sees, with no double entry. This is the records primitive the rest of the stack depends on.

OutPosts — the community platform that sits on top of LP Account. Partner orgs, members, and case managers meet in one place. The core consumer surface is free forever; premium surfaces never gate eligibility, documents, or care continuity.

Oasis — a post-Series-A creator-economy and civic-infrastructure expansion. A 5–10% commission band funds public goods inside the platform itself. Open APIs and procurement-ready endpoints reach the cities, counties, and foundations that already serve these households.

The trust architecture

The mission cannot be sold. That sentence is the load-bearing one. Zion is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation bound by a public Charter that constrains every product surface — no tracking, no dark patterns, no core paywall. The Charter is enforceable; violations are visible.

Above the corporation sits a Perpetual Purpose Trust — not a board majority — that holds the company’s purpose. A Trust Advisory Board, including community representation, ratifies any change to that purpose. A future acquirer cannot strip the mission out by buying a controlling stake, because the controlling stake of purpose is not for sale.

The Charter, the Mission Trust instrument, and the No Core Paywall Pledge are all posted publicly. We tell investors and foundation officers the same thing we tell the press and the public: read the constraints. If they don’t hold up, the company doesn’t work.

Why this, why now

Three macro shifts have made this possible. First, the consumer-controlled records pattern is finally practical: cheap storage, ubiquitous mobile, mature consent-grant primitives. Second, the safety-net administrative burden is at a generational high, and the public sector is openly looking for technical partners who can shoulder some of it. Third, capital is hunting for outcomes-aligned vehicles — both venture and foundation — and the Charter-bound PBC + Perpetual Purpose Trust structure is the most credible answer we can offer.

The next step is straightforward. Read the Theory of Change. Read the Charter. If the structure looks right, talk to us. The data room is shared on request — there’s nothing behind a form on this site, and nothing in the data room that would surprise you given what’s public.

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SOURCES · ALICE methodology from United Way / United For ALICE. Household counts from the 2024 ALICE Report. Federal/state benefits expenditure figures from the most recent Congressional Research Service compilation. All figures footnoted on the Theory of Change page.