The dilemma of a Medicare-eligible founder of a non-profit startup
Do I want to manage people, products and projects again?
In late 2020, I launched a non-profit company called Sibs Forever.
My commitment and passion for this project were unleashed when my then 11-year-old grandson Hayden passed away from a fatal brain tumor in August 2020; the cancer was diagnosed just ten months earlier. His death turned his twin sister Brenna into a surviving sibling. I’ve been a surviving sibling myself for over 50 years, beginning when my then 14-year-old sister Robin passed away quite unexpectedly back in 1967; I was 12 years old. No words can describe how difficult it is to be a surviving sibling. You suddenly lose a huge piece of yourself and have to forge a new path in a very different reality. I started Sibs Forever in memory of Robin and Hayden, intending to provide crucial resources for surviving siblings like Brenna and me.
During the past two years, I’ve worked solo designing, developing and promoting sibsforever.org, which functions as an online memory book for surviving siblings. It is a secure and private platform for surviving siblings to chronicle memories through storytelling, pictures, and videos. By sharing their stories and experiences, the sibsforever.org community can become a safe and supportive space for surviving siblings.
I’ve written about my experiences developing sibsforever.org in the following articles:
I deployed a beta release of the flagship sibsforever.org app at the beginning of 2022.
At that time, I reached out to many non-profits attempting to get the SibsForever service listed on one of their online resources pages. I discovered disorganized pages of seemingly random links during this process, many of which were either stale, outdated, or downright misleading.
This discovery led to my idea of writing a second application to curate, rank, and offer crowdsourced reviews for online resources (beginning with sibling loss and growing from there). It will be the Yelp of online resources. It’s a significant project powered by a machine learning model.
I wrote about my preparation for this project in this article:
As I continue my data science journey, it has become more apparent that this project’s scope and scale are incompatible with working solo. I’m in a quandary.
Do I apply for grants and get money to hire a team?
Or do I continue the slow sludge in solo mode?
I describe my delightfully balanced daily routine in this article:
Here is the crux of my dilemma:
- I spend hours every day exercising, practicing viola and cello, walking my dogs (and doing technical work). As a reformed workaholic, I’m concerned about upsetting my newly acquired work/not-work balance.
- I’ve previously led cross-functional teams, so I know what it entails. It’s a different kind of work and not my favorite thing (i.e., lots of planning activities). However, if I continue as a soloist, the release of my second application could be years away, which is less than ideal.
So I’m torn.
But I went ahead and just applied for this grant:
On the one hand, I’ll be thrilled to have this kind of opportunity. And on the other hand, I’ll be relieved if I don’t make the cut.
