Hiring Samaritan’s Community Storyteller

Jonathan Kumar
Samaritan Journal
Published in
3 min readMar 23, 2020

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| role |
This one’s easy. As you travel your city this week, you’ll see that homelessness is one of the biggest issues of our time. Taxpayers, healthcare systems, businesses, and nonprofits are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year combating it, and they- no, we are losing.

We’ve seen that surrounding an unhoused person with two simple resources — financial capital and relational guidance — can be catalytic to them finding a permanent home. So we’re incredibly excited to bring on our Community Storyteller to grow access to those two resources. If you have a background as a growth hacker and copywriter read on; we want to help people elevate themselves from the street with your help.

| opportunities |
· Lead digital campaigns and inbound content to raise capital for beacon-holding neighbors

· Create online content to help beacon holders learn how to use their beacon effectively to meet self-determined goals

· Engage and provide content to nonprofits and healthcare providers using Samaritan to elevate the outcomes of the people they serve

· Communicate progress and stories of impact to all stakeholders through push notifications, social outlets, email and more

| desired experience |
· Copywriting in micro-, short-, and/or long-form

· Measuring key product / service metrics and then running experiments to improve a specific metric (sample metrics include: avg. income per beacon holder, avg. samaritans per beacon holder, % of active samaritans, etc.)

· Growing an online community through effective outbound / inbound engagement

· Practicing a sense of design and typography when creating visual communication materials (presentation decks, light UI/UX, print assets, etc.)

| compensation and application |

FT salary ($42K-$60K starting), equity & perks, with raises as Samaritan grows.

If you are interested in deeply impacting people without a home at scale in our cities, send us a note with a few links to previous projects and we’ll get started.

| about samaritan |

Samaritan provides smart wallets for people without a home, linking them to financial capital and relational guidance needed to leave the street.

Nonprofits and healthcare providers offer the smart wallets (beacons) as a resource for people struggling through homelessness. Housed residents can learn the stories of beacon holders through the Samaritan app, helping them invest financially and relationally into people they may pass by daily: that homeless mother on the bus, the grandfather on the street, the unsheltered teen outside the supermarket.

Beacon holders can spend received funds with a counselor or partnered merchant to address critical needs, and can also earn bonuses by completing set goals or positive actions in their community. Every month, they meet with their counselor or health clinician to set goals and share needs for the month ahead. We’ve found this strengthened access to capital and relationships can lead to incredible outcomes in our first pilot in Seattle.

The vision is to equip health organizations and nonprofits in 100 cities to surround people with the financial and relational capital needed to leave the street. Our next deployment is in LA followed by Oklahoma City, New York City, and Portland. We need your help to give beacon holders in these and the next 95 cities their best opportunity to find a home.

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Jonathan Kumar
Samaritan Journal

Working on @youaresamaritan to help people help others.