About

Background

Many government agencies and medical providers now assume that people have a stable phone number, a personal email address, and the ability to receive a verification code by text on short notice. Notices about benefits often arrive by email, online accounts may ask for a code before they open, and warnings about dangerous weather often reach people first on their phones.

For people who face systemic barriers to technological access, none of these assumptions is reliably true. Prepaid phone plans lapse, devices are lost or stolen, and an email account can become impossible to open when its password recovery depends on a phone number that no longer works. Losing access to one account often blocks access to others, and a person may miss a notice or a code without ever knowing it was sent.

VOICE works to provide community-run alternatives to these channels, operated by volunteers. Anyone can leave a message, by phone or in writing, for someone who does not have reliable access to a phone or email, and volunteers work to deliver it. People can be given an email address for correspondence with agencies, which volunteers monitor for them, so it does not depend on the person keeping a phone number or a password. Documents can also be faxed to VOICE's fax number on someone's behalf. Alerts reach any phone or computer with an internet connection, including one on Wi-Fi alone, and Beacon screens and sheets share many of the same alerts with people who have no device at all. At in-person sessions, volunteers help people with their phones and accounts, including applications for Lifeline phones.

History

VOICE builds on a long history of similar efforts. From 1991 until about 2015, Community Voice Mail provided free voicemail boxes to tens of thousands of people each year through social service agencies across the United States. Public libraries have offered telephones, computers, and help with forms for decades. VOICE attempts to bring phone, email, fax, alerts, and in-person help together into one system that a small group of volunteers can run with free or inexpensive tools, and to publish that system openly so that other communities can adapt it.

Approach

The design of VOICE draws on four bodies of practice.

Mutual aid, as Dean Spade describes it in his 2020 book of that name, is people organizing to meet one another's needs directly, with help flowing in more than one direction. Help offered this way asks no one to prove need, so using VOICE requires no referral, identification, or proof of income. Anyone willing to learn the work can volunteer, including people who use VOICE, and each volunteer takes on work suited to their experience and to the level of trust it requires.

Sasha Costanza-Chock's 2020 book Design Justice, and the Design Justice Network, argue that the people most affected by a system should have a central role in shaping it. The people who use VOICE can also volunteer and help run it, each person makes the decisions that concern them, and anyone is welcome to suggest corrections to these pages. The tools VOICE relies on are inexpensive and replaceable, and an alternative to each one is documented.

Asset-based community development, which John Kretzmann and John McKnight set out in Building Communities from the Inside Out (1993), begins from the skills, relationships, and resources a community already has. VOICE builds on what people already do, such as leaving a message with a caseworker or a trusted friend, and draws its volunteers from the organizations and networks already present in a neighborhood.

In Emergent Strategy (2017), adrienne maree brown describes change that grows through small, adaptive actions and relationships of trust. VOICE began with a phone number, a shared inbox, and a regular in-person session, and new parts are added only once the existing ones work reliably. Its procedures are written down, tested in practice, and revised as experience teaches, and volunteers take turns monitoring incoming messages so that everyone has regular relief.

Consent and Choice

VOICE follows the principles of trauma-informed practice, which treat predictability and choice as forms of safety. Before helping with anything, a volunteer explains what will happen, including who will see a message and what the volunteer can and cannot do. Each person decides for themselves whether to use a service, what their email address will be, what name volunteers use for them, and how they would like to be contacted. Before a wildcard address is created, for example, the person learns that volunteers can see who sends email to it and the subject of each email. When a volunteer helps with an account, the person types their own passwords, the volunteer asks before looking at the screen, and the volunteer steps away while an identity service takes a picture or video of the person's face. When a website requires something VOICE cannot provide, the volunteer says so plainly and helps look for another option.

Limits and Open Questions

VOICE works on a small scale within systems it does not control, and several tensions remain unresolved.

Access and Privacy

A wildcard address lets a verification code reach someone during an in-person session without their needing a password of their own, although the volunteers who monitor the shared inbox can see who sends email to it and the subject of each message. A private account can be opened only by its holder, but it needs some way to recover a lost password. Volunteers explain the difference before either is set up, and each person chooses for themselves.

Reliance on Large Platforms

The phone and email services behind VOICE's phone line and email addresses are free, and their providers can change their terms at any time or reclaim a phone number that goes unused. The Program Replication pages describe alternatives in case a provider needs to be replaced.

Volunteer Capacity

How quickly a message is delivered depends on volunteers' capacity. Volunteers are not available at all hours, so VOICE does not promise a delivery time.

Changing Rules

Identity verification requirements and the rules of the federal Lifeline program continue to change. A project of this size can help people work through some of the barriers these create, but it cannot remove them.

Evaluation

The Switchboard records how many messages arrive and the outcome of each, and volunteers note problems as they occur. There is not yet a way for the people who use VOICE to say how well it works for them, and the team is still working out how best to ask.

Sources and Further Reading

The books, programs, and studies named on this page are listed on Related Work, each with its author, year, and publisher, and a link where it can be read online, along with other work that shaped VOICE. The sources for VOICE's approach to accessibility, including disability justice and trauma-informed practice, are listed on Accessibility.

Licensing and Reuse

The writing on this site is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0), and the VOICE software is free and open source under the GNU Affero General Public License. The Program Replication section documents how each part of VOICE is built and run.