Groundrise Pathways
Real support. Real opportunities. A better path.
Youth experiencing homelessness or housing instability are often routed through a maze of disconnected services, with no clear, structured path from crisis toward stability.
Groundrise Pathways organizes that path directly: stability, employment, education, resources, and housing brought together as one guided pathway instead of a scattered list of services to figure out alone.
In practice, that means a single path a young person can follow week to week. An immediate need gets addressed first, then the next concrete step toward stable housing, steady income, or continued education, rather than a stack of separate programs with their own intake processes and waitlists.
The Problem
Homeless and housing-insecure youth face disconnected services with no clear, structured path toward stability.
The Approach
Groundrise Pathways gives young people a structured pathway toward stability, employment, resources, education, and housing, organized as a single guided path.
unaccompanied youth counted experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2024 (a point-in-time count, not an annual incidence figure), across 385 Continuums of Care
Verified· U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2024increase in the unaccompanied-youth count from 2023 to 2024
Verified· U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2024North Carolina counties covered by NCCARE360 (powered by Unite Us), with thousands of participating organizations - the closed-loop-referral gap is already well served there
Verified· NCCARE360 / Unite Us, 2026Continuums of Care (regional homelessness-response systems) - the core national institutional universe
Verified· U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2024Unite Us
Social-care coordination platform
- social-needs screening
- closed-loop referrals
- care coordination
- outcome tracking
- integrations
- analytics
Overlap: Referral coordination and outcome tracking
Differentiation: Unite Us (as NCCARE360) already operates across all 100 NC counties with a large participating network; Groundrise isn't trying to out-build that referral network, it's built specifically around a youth's individual pathway rather than resource discovery.
Findhelp
Nationwide social-care network
- resource discovery
- closed-loop referral
- case management
- analytics
- system integrations
Overlap: Resource discovery and referral management
Differentiation: Findhelp's network spans hundreds of thousands of programs nationally; Groundrise specializes in youth-specific progression rather than general-population resource search.
Why This Can Still Win
Unite Us and Findhelp already do resource directories and closed-loop referral well, including NCCARE360's full coverage of North Carolina, so Groundrise doesn't compete there. Its opportunity is specialization: youth-centered UX, personalized progression plans with structured milestones across housing, work, education, and documentation, and continuity when a young person moves between organizations - answering "what should this young person do next" rather than only "what services exist nearby."
Illustrative Cascadia model based on adjustable assumptions. This is not a forecast of future performance.
Downside
- MRR
- $12,500
- ARR
- $150,000
- Gross Profit
- $112,500
Base
- MRR
- $62,500
- ARR
- $750,000
- Gross Profit
- $562,500
Upside
- MRR
- $250,000
- ARR
- $3,000,000
- Gross Profit
- $2,250,000
Existing Cascadia Asset
- An existing, working codebase rather than a blank repository
- Product architecture and data model already designed
- UX/UI already designed and tested against a real workflow
- Product workflows already established, not hypothetical
- Market and competitive research already completed
- A defined brand and product identity
Start Internally
- Discovery and product strategy
- Architecture and data-model design
- UX/UI design
- Engineering across the full product surface
- Infrastructure and integrations
- Testing, security review, and deployment
- Iteration against real usage
- Market validation
Illustrative internal-build labor model
Using Cascadia’s illustrative internal development-team model (2 developers, 0.5 QA, 0.5 UX/interface design, 0.5 product/project management, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics national mean compensation benchmarks, plus a 30% Cascadia assumption for employer burden and overhead), a build over this venture’s typical timeline represents the following in modeled direct and burdened labor — before infrastructure, integrations, compliance, implementation, training, or support.
6-month build
~$300,000
9-month build
~$450,000
12-month build
~$600,000
Sources
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report” (2024)
- NCCARE360 / Unite Us, “North Carolina statewide coordination network coverage” (2026)
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Interested in Groundrise Pathways?
Cascadia Venture Works is open to conversations regarding strategic partnerships, licensing, pilots, investment, and acquisition opportunities where appropriate.