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Product, microfinance, & social service wizards walking with our most vulnerable neighbors
Between people who've been homeless, social workers, designers, developers, and experts in medicaid & emergency healthcare, we created samaritan…
Team & Values
Founder &
Head of Outcomes
Jonathan
Kumar
Born to immigrant parents in poverty, Jonathan and his family quickly learned the value and need for community. Receiving an opportunity to study at the University of Michigan, Jonathan earned a degree in Informatics, specializing in UX design. After producing a documentary on social change, Jonathan developed a tool for restaurants to convert surplus food into funding for local food banks called FoodCircles. From there he helped create Samaritan, with the goal to give people without a home the social and financial support needed to leave the street.
Everyone needs a team, rich or poor. When you put a social home around someone, we find that the physical home often follows soon after.
Head of Product
& Co-Founder
Chris
Sun
Believing in Samaritan’s ability to inspire hope and enable change for unhoused communities, Chris joined Samaritan to help overworked and underpaid nonprofits accelerate outcomes of their work. During Seattle’s first pilot, Chris led nonprofits to deploy Samaritan for over 500 unhoused individuals & families. Given his hands-on and deeply-relational work with the unhoused community, there was no better candidate to take over Product Ownership from Jonathan in 2019.
Brand value
1
We are…
Community
-first
We believe the most common cause of homelessness is lack of social capital, and that providing it—providing neighbors—is a vital step on the road back to housing.
Chief Operating Officer
Ariel
Cooper
Ariel works across health and social sectors to generate innovative solutions that improve community wellbeing and center health equity. Grounded in human-centered design practices, her projects have spanned stakeholder engagement, strategic partnerships, and program planning & implementation. Ariel received her Masters from UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, where she conducted research with the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and taught as a Graduate Student Instructor. She previously received her BA in Human Geography from UC Berkeley.
Brand value
2
We exude…
Humility
We come in understated, and let words & actions speak for themselves. We are to be less. Our partners (especially Samaritan Members) are to be more.
Growth Lead
Ashish
Pamula
Ashish helps lead Samaritan’s efforts to reach more people on the street by spearheading partnerships with incredible grassroots organizations. Raised in the Inland Empire and solidified by Hyderabadi roots, disrupting complacency became the common tongue. After learning about Samaritan on a podcast, Ashish jumped at the opportunity to join the team and reduce the days a person spends without a home.
The best feeling is to take others with you… to share the light that you create & the light that you attract. — Sarah Spain
Brand value
3
We exude…
Poverty-in
-spirit
When we realize we are born in the same image and are all in need, we partner with people instead of pitying them.
Sr. Backend Engineer
Danny
Sperry
Danny has witnessed the life-changing power of encouragement, charity, and determination. Raised by a father that showed him the value of taking time out of your day to help another. Danny passionately reached out to Samaritan in 2018 and helped the team scale the technology to more cities. He is dedicated to helping build a service that serves people in need and those that support them.
If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moments. One person can change the world by giving people hope.” — Admiral William H. McRaven
Lead iOS Engineer
Arrido
Arfiadi
Arrido believes in tech for good and that it should be inclusive, equitable and accessible to everyone. He found love in the work and impact the company is making, and decided to join the team full-time after completing his hackership. Outside of work, you can find Arrido watching Friends while eating fries.
Brand value
4
We are…
Hope-oriented
Over time, acts of kindness help people rebuild hope and gain capacity to move forward. We can’t shelter everyone today, but we'll provide social & financial support for them to find homes soon.
Full Stack Engineer
Nick
Henderson
Born and raised in Sacramento and currently living in the Bay Area, Nick has seen first hand the struggles faced by people in need. He graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California Santa Cruz and began his career in the tech industry. However, after his first tech job in the real world, Nick realized that he needed his work to have a purpose. He found that purpose at Samaritan, where he currently works to help build a service that serves people in need and those that support them.
Brand value
5
We are…
Joyful
We seek and uphold joy throughout all facets of our work, as well as in every individual we have the opportunity to serve.
Advisory
Board
In October of 2015, founder
Jonathan Kumar stood on a street
corner in downtown Seattle…
He watched a man beg for 20 minutes as not a single car opened a window for him. The man, Edward, stood there painfully, seeking diabetes medication for his feet after recently ending up on the street.
As person after person passed the man by, Jonathan eventually approached him and had a conversation with him. It was then that Jonathan realized this man was experiencing not just financial poverty, but a profound sense of relational poverty.
Many urban citygoers continually confront homelessness, but are caught without time, cash, or wherewithal on if cash will help. “I want to help. I’m unsure how.” These and other barriers lead to the easiest response: do nothing. And so, individuals without a home are told 100s of times an hour that they don’t exist.
Samaritan exists to link these individuals to the social and financial capital needed to meet housing and health goals. In parallel, their stories will truly change the lives of their neighbors passing by them on a daily basis.
Samaritan doesn’t own any apartment buildings or shelters. But if Samaritan can’t guarantee everyone a physical house yet, it’ll begin by providing anyone a social home. It’s not about “changing the world”; it’s about changing someone’s world, right now. And that’s a start.
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