The Dignity Dividend: Why Speed Is a Justice Issue

There's a question I ask myself often, one that cuts through every technical conversation about platforms and processing times and payment systems: How long would I be willing to wait if I needed help?

If my child needed food and I had no money for groceries, how many days would feel acceptable? If I was facing eviction and rent was due tomorrow, how patient would I be with bureaucratic timelines? If I'd just lost my job and had no way to pay for childcare, what review period would feel reasonable?

The answer, of course, is immediate. I would want help immediately. Not in three weeks when my application gets reviewed. Not in 10 business days while my documents are verified. Not in six weeks after the next funding cycle. Right now. Today. Before the crisis becomes catastrophe.

This isn't an unreasonable expectation. It's the standard we apply to nearly everything else in our lives.

When I need to send money to a friend, Cash App moves it instantly. When I need information, Google delivers it in milliseconds. When I need a ride, Uber shows up in minutes. When I need to reach someone, a phone call connects immediately. We've built an entire economy around the expectation of instant response to human need.

Except when it comes to the safety net. Except when it comes to helping people in crisis. Then, suddenly, we accept delays as inevitable. We talk about "processing times" and "review periods" as if they're natural laws rather than choices we've made. We build systems that move at the speed of bureaucracy instead of the speed of need.

This isn't just inefficiency. It's injustice. And it's a choice we can unmake.

When Delays Compound Crisis

I want to tell you about a pattern I've seen too many times. Someone applies for rental assistance. They're behind on rent, maybe two months, and their landlord has filed for eviction. The application is complete, the eligibility is clear, the need is urgent. Then they wait.

Week one: Still waiting. They call their landlord, asking for more time. The landlord says they'll see.

Week two: Still waiting. The eviction notice arrives. Court date set for week four.

Week three: Still waiting. They start looking at shelters, pulling their child out of school to prepare for displacement.

Week four: The payment is approved! But the eviction hearing is tomorrow, and processing the payment will take another five business days.

Week five: The money arrives. The family has already been evicted.

This story isn't hypothetical. It's the lived reality of benefit delivery designed for administrative convenience rather than human urgency. And here's what kills me: in this scenario, the system "worked." The application was approved. The payment was sent. The program did what it was supposed to do.

It was just too slow to matter.

Delays don't just cost time. They cost trust, stability, and sometimes they cost everything. A week's delay in rental assistance can mean homelessness. A month's delay in childcare subsidies can mean a parent losing their job. Three weeks waiting for food assistance can mean children going hungry. Five business days to process emergency cash can mean the emergency has already destroyed what you were trying to save.

Speed isn't a technical feature. It's a moral imperative.

The Empathy Standard

Here's a thought experiment I use when designing systems: What if this was for you?

If you were facing eviction, would you accept a three-week review process? If your child needed childcare so you could work, would six weeks feel reasonable? If you'd lost my income and had no way to buy food, would 10 business days be okay?

The answer is always no. Not because you're impatient, but because emergencies don't wait for systems to catch up. Crisis operates on its own timeline, one that doesn't care about review cycles or funding periods or office hours.

It gives us a simple directive: designing systems that move at the speed we would want if we needed them ourselves. Not the speed that's convenient for administration, but the speed that prevents harm.

Over the past few years, we glimpsed what this could look like. Stimulus checks reached people in days, not months. Expanded unemployment insurance got deposited quickly. Enhanced earned income tax credits hit bank accounts with unprecedented speed. These weren't accidents of generosity. They were proof of concept: when we decide that speed matters, we can deliver it.

But here's what we learned in that moment and haven't fully reckoned with: despite the clearly demonstrated impact of a strong social safety net, intersecting barriers still prevent millions from accessing benefits they're eligible to receive. And one of the most significant barriers is time itself. The time it takes to apply. The time it takes to review. The time it takes to process payment. The time between when help is needed and when it arrives.

Every day of delay is a day someone goes without. Every week of processing is a week closer to eviction, to hunger, to losing the job because childcare fell through. Every month of review is a month of compounding crisis.

Speed isn't efficiency. It's equity.

The Justice Case for Immediacy

There's a particular injustice in slow systems that we don't talk about enough: they punish people who can't afford to wait.

If you have savings, you can wait three weeks for rental assistance while paying rent from your reserve. If you have family support, you can wait a month for childcare subsidies while relatives cover care. If you have a financial cushion, you can wait for emergency cash while managing on credit.

But if you have none of these things, if you're living day to day, paycheck to paycheck, then every day of delay pushes you closer to the edge. The system isn't just slow for everyone equally. It's actively more harmful to those who need help most urgently.

Fast delivery of benefits doesn't just make programs more convenient. It prevents the compounding harm that slow systems inflict disproportionately on those already most vulnerable.

Consider two families applying for the same rental assistance program. Family A has savings and supportive relatives. They can wait a month for approval without becoming homeless. Family B has neither. For them, a month's delay means eviction, shelter, school disruption, job loss, trauma. Same program, same benefit, radically different outcomes based entirely on their ability to wait.

This is the dignity dividend: when we deliver support quickly, we prevent the cascading crises that slow systems create. We stop evictions before they happen. We preserve employment by ensuring childcare doesn't lapse. We prevent the hunger that makes it impossible to focus at school or work. We maintain stability rather than requiring recovery from instability we could have prevented.

What Speed Actually Requires

I've spent years building the infrastructure that makes fast delivery possible, and I want to be clear about what it takes. Speed isn't about cutting corners. It isn't about sacrificing thoroughness for velocity. It isn't about removing necessary safeguards.

Speed requires better systems.

It requires applications designed so well that people can complete them correctly the first time. It requires verification processes smart enough to catch fraud without creating barriers for legitimate applicants. It requires review workflows that surface the most urgent cases first. It requires payment infrastructure that can move money in hours, not weeks. It requires customer support that can solve problems in real time rather than queuing tickets for callback.

At Unify, we've proven this is possible. We've reduced approval times from weeks to hours. We've cut payment processing from five business days to same-day delivery. We've moved nearly $300 million to over nearly two hundred thousand recipients, and we've done it quickly enough that help arrived while it still mattered.

This wasn't achieved by lowering standards. We maintained robust fraud prevention, thorough verification, and complete compliance. We just built systems that don't equate slowness with carefulness.

The programs we've powered demonstrate what becomes possible:

• Rental assistance that arrives before eviction rather than after
• Childcare subsidies that start when parents need to return to work, not months later
• Emergency cash that reaches families while it's still an emergency they can recover from
• Disaster relief that feels like relief, not delayed consolation

Each of these outcomes depends on speed. Not as a nice-to-have feature, but as the foundation of meaningful impact.

Reimagining Urgency

Our end goal is clear: now is the time for broadly accessible and speedily delivered benefits with as few strings attached as possible, connected to supports that facilitate upward mobility.

That phrase "speedily delivered" isn't incidental. It's central. Because accessibility without speed still leaves people in crisis. Eligibility without rapid delivery still results in harm that could have been prevented. Good intentions without urgent response still means families losing housing, going hungry, sacrificing necessities.

I think often about what it means to build systems worthy of the moment we're in. We live in an era of instant everything. We've proven we can move money immediately, deliver information instantly, connect people in real time. We've built global infrastructure around the assumption that waiting is unacceptable.

Why should the safety net be different? Why should the most urgent human needs be served by the slowest systems? Why should people facing crisis be asked to wait patiently while systems designed decades ago slowly process their desperation?

The answer is they shouldn't. And we don't have to accept this as inevitable.

Every delay we eliminate is a crisis we prevent. Every day we shave off processing time is a family that stays housed. Every hour we reduce in approval time is a parent who keeps their job because childcare came through. Every minute we save matters because someone's life is on hold waiting for our systems to help.

The Promise of Now

When I talk to potential partners, government agencies considering modernization, funders evaluating where to invest, I make a simple argument: speed is dignity.

When someone needs help and reaches out, how long they wait is a statement about their value. Long wait times communicate: your emergency isn't really an emergency. Your crisis can wait for our convenience. Your need, however urgent to you, fits into our timeline, not the other way around.

Fast response communicates something different: you matter. Your crisis is real. Your need is urgent. We built our systems to match the speed of your life, not the other way around.

This is the dignity dividend. When we deliver support quickly, we don't just prevent harm. We restore trust in systems that have historically failed. We demonstrate that public support can be responsive, not just bureaucratic. We prove that care and speed aren't opposing values.

We've reached over one million people through Unify. We've helped unlock over $640 million in support across diverse programs and communities. But our proudest metric isn't volume. It's velocity. It's the knowledge that when help arrived, it arrived in time to matter. That families stayed housed because payment came before eviction. That parents kept working because childcare started when they needed it. That children stayed fed because food assistance didn't require waiting while hungry.

This is what we're building toward: a world where the social safety net actually catches people before they fall. Where applying for help doesn't mean enduring weeks of crisis while systems slowly process your desperation. Where support moves at the speed of need because we finally decided that human urgency deserves urgency in response.

An Invitation to Urgency

I started with a question: How long would you be willing to wait if you needed help?

Here's the question I want to leave you with: How long are we willing to make others wait?

Every day we accept slow systems as inevitable is a day we're choosing bureaucratic convenience over human need. Every week we tolerate as "normal processing time" is a week someone goes without, falls further behind, loses ground they'll struggle to regain.

We know better now. We've proven that speed is possible without sacrificing integrity. We've demonstrated that the technology exists to move at the pace of human need. We've shown that the infrastructure can be built to deliver support as quickly as crisis demands it.

The only question remaining is will. Are we willing to build systems that move at the speed we would want if we needed them? Are we ready to treat speed as what it is: not a technical nicety but a moral necessity? Can we finally close the gap between what we know is possible and what we're willing to deliver?

This is Unify's commitment: that speed will never be sacrificed to convenience. That urgency in delivery will match urgency in need. That the infrastructure we build will honor the reality that emergencies don't wait, and neither should the systems designed to help.

Because in the end, delay isn't neutral. It's a choice with consequences measured in evictions, in job losses, in children going without. And speed isn't just efficiency. It's justice. It's dignity. It's the promise that when you need help, it will arrive in time to matter.

We've made that promise to nearly two hundred thousand people. We've kept it. And we're inviting you to imagine what becomes possible when we scale that commitment: when every benefit program, every safety net service, every form of public support operates at the speed of genuine care.

Not tomorrow. Not next quarter. Not when the next review cycle opens.

Now. Because that's when people need it. And that's what they deserve.