Portrait No. 001
Madeline Dangerfield-Cha
Co-Founder & CEO
Mon Ami
Mon Ami builds case management software for state government agencies that support older adults and adults with disabilities. I was raised by a single mom and my maternal grandmother; they remain my best friends to this day. Our society has overlooked and neglected them in so many ways, and there are millions of women just like them on the frontlines of our country's caregiving crisis. Whatever we can do increase funding for their services, make accessing it a little easier, and enable all people to age with dignity in the place of their choosing -- that's my life's work.
In her words
“I was raised by a single mom and my maternal grandmother; they remain my best friends to this day.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
Mon Ami v1, prior to Feb 2020, was a D2C matching platform, connecting college students with older adults, often with dementia, for companionship and visiting. This is often referred to as 'respite care' as it gives the caregiver, usually a spouse or an adult daughter, a break from their unpaid physical and emotional labor. Of course, when the pandemic hit, we had to wind that down, and perhaps close up shop entirely. Some of our investors told us they didn't believe we were strong founders who could make it through this and we needed to return what remained of their money. But, the caregiving crisis was more acute than ever. Senior centers and other nonprofits on the front lines were getting hundreds of calls a day from their constituents, terrified and sheltering in place, unsure how they were going to get their medications or groceries. These community providers had no technology to handle that scale of need with matching volunteers; their systems were antiquated and prone to crashing. Mon Ami made a sharp pivot to become the case management database to government agencies, starting in San Francisco in April 2020, we're now the system of record handling federal reporting for the deployment of Older Americans Act funds in more than a dozen states.
Chapter II
Your vision.
Human services in our country are under attack; grossly underfunded, the whole social safety net for older adults is being held together by the dedication of (mostly) women - social workers, nurses, paid caregivers - who get no glory. They work in cubicles, entering their notes into systems that crash multiple times a day, driving across multiple counties to visit someone who has no other family or friends left in the world. Mon Ami exists to give them the best technology in the world, lightning-fast, easy to use, and truly helpful. So they can spend more of their time and energy giving love to those that need it most.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
A state Medicaid IT director said at a conference recently, “Business processes get stagnated by the technology. Not the other way around.” Existing government technology vendors profit more by being slow, burdensome, and hard to work with. So many human lives are taxed by those delays! People waiting on their benefit payment, on getting enrolled in services, or on speaking to a human being instead of a voicemail box. The agile, responsive nature of consumer technology will come to human service departments all over the world.