Designing for the
worst day
of someone’s life.
Displaced families waiting in shelters. Six disconnected tools. A federal clock running. I led design and delivery — one record for three roles that had never shared a system, deployed nationally inside a single disaster response cycle. It had to work for an untrained volunteer on day one, under surge, with federal oversight active from the moment it went live. It did. 1,689 cases in the first two weeks.
Two people still have to vouch for one payment. The other approved itself.
The ID had already been verified. That's exactly why changing it stopped the payment.
The alert doesn't clear because you saw it. It clears because you acted on it.
Six flags collapse into one line — until someone decides to actually look.
Every case that lands already knows which module it belongs to.
Built to verify eligibility,
certify compliance, and catch fraud.
Six systems. Three roles.
One source of truth.
A new information model — not a consolidation of what existed. Six tools had grown around six functions, none designed to share data. The only path forward was to design the data architecture first, the interface second.
Three fields.
Everything else invisible.
Three fields on the intake form trigger eligibility checks, identity verification, and FEMA audit trail generation — automatically. The caseworker sees simplicity. The architecture holds everything else.
One record.
Three completely different jobs.
Same record, three role-specific views, zero redundant data entry. The field volunteer never thinks about FEMA compliance. The finance officer never re-enters what the caseworker already captured. One information model built to serve all three.
A household grows.
An event grows. Same record.
Add one household member mid-case and a new need clears eligibility before the caseworker moves on. Add one disaster event and watch its own case count move as the first real case lands against it. The architecture that handles a family of three handles a national disaster — without anyone rebuilding it in between.