Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
How equity shows up in our product design, hiring, and partnerships — not as a values page, but as operational practice.
Equity is a product decision
The single biggest equity choice we made is who we build for. The identity industry serves enterprise customers by default. We deliberately built for the populations that off-the-shelf tools weren’t designed for: veterans, refugees, displaced families, domestic-violence survivors, and the community organizations serving them. That choice shapes every other design decision downstream.
In product design
- Language accessibility. Multi-language support is a first-class feature in refugee-facing modules, not a bolt-on.
- Document realism. We accept the documents people actually have — not just the documents the system theoretically wants.
- Survivor-centered defaults. VAWA-Safe sealing is opt-out-by-effort, not opt-in-by-luck. Caseworkers flag a record; the system enforces.
- No exclusion by default. We don’t ship gender binaries that exclude trans residents, family structures that exclude chosen family, or eligibility filters that exclude people with non-traditional identification.
- Cultural sensitivity in care. Care types in VDMS include culturally specific options (equine therapy, nature therapy, faith-based peer support) alongside Western clinical modalities.
In hiring
We hire from the populations we serve when we can. Veteran preference is a real preference, not a tagline. Lived experience with the case-management systems we replace is worth more on our team than years of unrelated software experience.
In partnerships
We prioritize partnerships with organizations led by people from the communities they serve: veteran-led veteran orgs, refugee-led refugee orgs, survivor-led DV programs. We do pro-bono and discounted licensing for small organizations doing this work without enterprise budgets (see Give Back).
What this isn’t
This isn’t a values statement we workshopped to put on a website. We don’t have an internal DEI committee or training program to point to — we’re a small company. What we do have is a product and a customer list that reflects these commitments in practice. If those don’t match the words on this page, the words are wrong, not the work.