We build free resources and tools that people can use during the hardest times of their lives. Each resource we build focuses on a different issue, and provides a free solution to address or mitigate that issue, with no strings attached.

Verena, our security system app, helps people in dangerous situations by contacting their emergency contacts without leaving a trace on their phone.

Aetheria, our mental illness management app, has over 30 tools that use CBT & DBT techniques to help reduce and manage symptoms.

Aureus, our design system, governs every resource. Our design system is responsible for making sure our resources are accessible, and provides custom safety plan functionality, so that a user can modify our resource depending on what they need.

These resources typically serve people in more complex situations than other for-profits can, and provide a baseline safety net of support for the person who needs the resource.

Software is cheap to build and incredibly easy to scale. For example, let’s say you want to have a non-profit organization where therapists hold private sessions to teach new parents healthy parenting skills to reduce child abuse.

Each therapist has a set amount of time in their day, and the more people you need to serve, the more therapists you need to hire.

If you spent $1000 on a therapist, you only could teach a fixed number of parents those skills. If you spent $1000 on a website, you could teach as many parents as those who visited the website (or until you reach your monthly server limit).

In addition, there’s a lower barrier to entry for someone to use software compared to filling out physical paperwork or going to in-person services, and that means we’re able to help more people.

Software is the perfect medium for charities to provide support: it’s cheap to build, scales incredibly well, and reaches a large amount of people.

We believe that building software that mitigates the harm that comes with experiencing certain things will result in longer and healthier lives.

The ACE study was a joint CDC and Kaiser Permanente study that shows the more adverse situations someone went through, the worse life outcomes they would have. You can learn more about the CDC / Kaiser ACE study here.

Even when you don’t look at childhood events specifically, the data is clear that trauma negatively impacts humans and their health, long after the trauma has occurred.

How we create impact is directly linked to that: if we can be something people can access at any times, we can potentially mitigate the stress and harm and improve quality of life, their health, and chance of survival.

We determine what issues we see and what we prioritize through our Vision of the Future document, and our State of Affairs survey.

Those two things tell us 1) what our predictions for the future are, and 2) what impacts our users the most.

As we develop a resource, we adhere everything to our core documents — these are the things that govern the ethics and operations of Astra.

From there, we have a “resource dissection”. This goes into what we’re making, why we’re making it, what the actual solutions are, how it will be laid out, how it can hurt others, and then how we can ensure the project is aligning with its’ goals.

You can find a sample of a resource dissection we use here.

Since we deal with some of the most stressful issues someone can face, the most important part of achieving our mission is creating a way for us to earn the trust of our users so we have the privilege of helping them.

The way we do that is through our core documents: an outline of our beliefs, ethics, values, predictions, and practices that enable us to help people safely. You can read our core documents here.

Our model of developing software doesn’t just help with the mental health crisis, or in supporting domestic violence victims.

Often, a lot of issues are often linked together and require a multi-step solution to truly and effectively serve someone through all of the things they may experience.

As a result, the more resources we build, the more effectively we can help people facing systemic issues.

Overall, we think what we’re onto has greater potential than just mental health or safety. And we’re making a taking a risk to try a new non-profit model that allows us to serve different areas and try to reach as many people as we can.

Instead of having donors or applying for grants, we bootstrap the organization and eventually plan on becoming self-sustaining with revenue from our future enterprise platforms.

This allows us to focus on building quality programs first, and allows us to run Astra the way we want to for our users, as opposed to taking on a model more favored by foundations or donors.

For example, we’re in the process of building a therapist platform for Aetheria, so a therapist can assign tools, get a better picture of their mental health, and improve the patient experience inside and outside of therapy sessions.

Because we work on a lot of different issues and everything is related to one design system, it makes taking ‘restricted’ funding hard. Restricted funding is a non-profit term that means funds must go to a specific project or activity.

Our software is incredibly low-cost to build with volunteer labor, and our design system. We typically only have the cost of a domain and developer licenses (around $200-300 a year) to account for. So, because it’s so low-cost, raising money would only be needed for salaries.

Because of restricted funding, we would either only be paid for a portion of the time we spend on one piece of software, or we would have to find multiple different grants for each issue we want to work on. That’s a tall order for a young non-profit with a unique program approach.

Even with grants, funding salaries instead of programs directly is something that not a lot of donors and foundations like to do.

So, to better serve our users and to be here for the future, we’ve decided to focus on becoming self-sustaining.

Aureus is our open-source design system library for user safety critical applications. It allows us to speed up the development time and quality of our resources by developing standardized screens, UI elements, and functionality, so we don’t have to rewrite it.

If you’ve ever baked a cake before, Aureus is the equivalent of a boxed cake mix. Instead of starting from scratch, you take the pre-made ingredients to get to a delicious end result much faster.

It depends on your company and what you want to do. We do not collaborate with companies that we believe are exploiting the communities we serve for profit, or companies who undermine our mission through their own work.

Due to time constraints, we are only interested in developing long-term relationships with others, as opposed to event-specific partnerships.

In the past we have:

• Reached out to other organizations for referral / resource partnerships

• Built designs, prototypes, developed software, and created other tech-related infrastructure for assorted non and for-profits.

• Served on advisory boards for specific projects that align with our mission

Long answer short, no. Between funding, legal issues with taking suggestions, and scope creep, we are unable to work directly with individuals to develop their applications. We only incubate new apps and features internally, and from the greater user feedback we get.

However, you can use our open source design system to develop your own non-profit applications. We also plan to invest in more time and infrastructure for those who want to build their own apps.