WHY WE BUILT RANGE

It isn’t a straightforward answer.

We talk to people all the time. We talk to them on the phone, in sessions designed to generate places where technology can be helpful. We do research to understand key issues. We talked to people in the area of food recovery. We talked to individuals who provide community resources to police officers. And in that work, we learned how youth weren't benefiting from free meals served during the summer. And we had to act.

At the same time, we were talking about impact.

Our team talked about making sure we were helping people meet basic needs: food, shelter, and medical attention. We thought about measuring our impact by the number of solutions our team developed that focused on basic needs. We put those thoughts together and decided to create Range. For all of us, the problem of childhood hunger is unacceptable. And for some of us, our wonky hearts swelled thinking about organizing data, displaying it in neat intuitive ways, and providing it in all kinds of circumstances.

We learned the numbers. And we keep working. 

The low number of youth who access summer meals is shocking. We knew we had to help. And, with an important first investment from Microsoft Corporate Citizenship, we started working on Range.