About Us - Overview

Meet The Need has spent 23 years in the “business” of making what seemed impossible – possible. All that’s required to break new ground (besides prayer) is a willingness to apply past learnings, experiences, and skills to make a difference – not money. Trusting God to supply the resources frees us to invest creativity, time, and energy into solving problems that appear insurmountable. The Lord always provides when we seek His glory and the welfare of His children.

Since 2001, Meet The Need has brought Business Intelligence and CRM principles from Big-5 management consulting to the world of poverty alleviation, enabling churches and ministries across the country to provide more help and hope to struggling families. As a non-profit, we’ve invested millions in innovative strategies and technologies to address issues that for-profit software vendors hadn't found lucrative enough to explore.

What Will Be Possible Tomorrow

Reimagining Compassion – Link2Hope revolutionizes how churches and charities help the materially poor. Rather than facilitating occasional events or seasonal “handouts”, Meet The Need’s newest app leverages AI to build sustainable circles of support around those who’ve felt isolated and disconnected. The strength of relationships determines the effectiveness of interventions. Link2Hope identifies individuals and organizations to walk alongside those seeking a path out of poverty. We’ve worked closely with thought-leaders like The Chalmers Center, True Charity, and The Open Table to ensure Link2Hope promotes dignity, not dependence.

Overcoming Division – Drop The Stone is Meet The Need’s countercultural response to the growing divisiveness in America. You’ve likely seen our campaign on social media, urging Christians not to engage in the vitriol surrounding the Presidential election season. How churches and believers have handled political disagreements within congregations and communities has contributed to division. We’ve reached hundreds of thousands with the message that acts of kindness for those across the political aisle are more Christ-like than throwing stones.

Uniting Churches – Strategy and technology don’t change hearts and minds. To move the needle on poverty in our cities, churches need to work together. Yet collaboration won’t happen unless America realizes “church” is not a place, a pastor, or an event on the weekends - it’s you and me living on mission all week long. Unity happens when the church is focused on equipping and mobilizing individuals, not organizational growth or survival. Meet The Need speaks on that topic and writes eBooks and blog posts read by over 1 million church leaders and members over the past 10 years.

What's Possible Today

Eliminating Food Waste – America disposes of close to 100 billion pounds of perfectly good food each year. But food rescue is complicated. In 2013, Feeding America approached Meet The Need with a radical idea – what if a partnership between our organizations could route food before it’s thrown away by restaurants, stores, and farms to shelters and agencies who feed the hungry. MealConnect is the realization of that vision – and the world’s largest food rescue network. Meet The Need continues to work closely with Feeding America to enhance and expand MealConnect’s capabilities, saving nearly 7 billion pounds of food that would have otherwise gone to waste.

Improving Homeless Outcomes – In 2015, homeless coalitions across the country complained that an HMIS (Homeless Management Information System) vendor with a near monopoly was making it difficult to extract, analyze, and report data. Generous donors funded Meet The Need’s development of an alternative HMIS analytics platform to gather data and share findings across cities and states. As a result of that partnership, coalitions have a better understanding of the policies and initiatives needed to help the homeless and address the crisis.

Reducing Children in Foster Care – In America, there is one church for every foster child, but engaging churches in fostering and adoption can be challenging. Since 2016, Meet The Need has helped Christian agencies recruit and mobilize churches to support foster families – and more importantly, take care of birth families before children are removed from homes. As was the case with homelessness, a dominant (and expensive) vendor limited church involvement in foster care – and enabled “transactional” compassion. So Meet The Need provides a no-cost, relational option for agencies, churches, and ministries in 7 states.

What Wasn't Possible Yesterday

Mobilizing Volunteers Where Most Needed – Jesus modeled compassion before evangelism. Accordingly, churches were the food bank and homeless shelter for 1,900 years. But by the early 2000s, churches weren’t even showing local volunteer needs to their members - and charities couldn’t easily communicate those opportunities to local churches. So Meet The Need built the first Volunteer Management system (long before that became an industry), which still reconnects and mobilizes the body of Christ to serve the (materially) poor.

Collaborating to Help Struggling Families – A couple decades ago, charities used spreadsheets to track what they were doing for families in the community. They had no idea how other churches or ministries were helping those same people. So Meet The Need developed the first Shared Case Management platform to reduce overlap, improve stewardship of limited resources, and design a coordinated plan of action to point families toward a brighter future.

Planning Multi-Church Compassion Events – We all remember a time that churches posted sign-up sheets in the foyer to register for outreach events. If several churches wanted to combine efforts, which is necessary to move the needle on important social causes, they had to divide and conquer. So Meet The Need designed the first collaborative Event Management system, enabling multiple organizations to see the same needs on their respective websites. And members from different churches and denominations now serve side-by-side in unity.