At Two Cents we've spent the last few years immersed in building a gallery of integrated apps for the affordable housing industry.

Now we're looking for neighborhood nonprofits ready to take a safe first step toward better technology as part of a cohort willing to learn, experiment, and figure things out together.

But this isn't just another app. It's a vision about putting data in its proper place.

And the more of us who participate, the more powerful it becomes.

The Data Belongs to the People

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It's up to us to put it to its best and highest use.

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Maybe we can't stop Big Data from doing whatever Big Data is gonna do. But we can decide how to use our own information more wisely. How to make it a resource for creating, preserving, and operating more affordable housing.

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We can have our industry data work for us, not against us. Imagine a database that belongs to your organization, built on a common structure that other nonprofits in the cohort can use, too.

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Your portfolio. Your information. Your decisions.

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But a shared foundation.

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Not a giant database where everybody's information gets thrown into one pot. Not another proprietary system that holds your data hostage. And not an attempt to make every nonprofit operate exactly alike.

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A common language for our data, with ownership remaining where it belongs.

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The more organizations that use it, the more useful that common language becomes. We can build tools once, adapt them to different circumstances, share what works, and stop solving the same problems in isolation. That's the part I find exciting.

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Less Is More

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Imagine spending less of your time lost in trying to nail the perfect forecast ... or the rearrangement of numbers ... or the $5 discrepancy ... or gathering statistics to back up another request. You have better things to do. Not on a device. In our communities, our neighborhoods, our properties.

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And the people who know these properties best should have more time to apply their experience and judgment.

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This is the idea we've baked into our solutions: The less time you spend using our tools? The more people win.

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Security Is As Security Does

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It was the question everyone started asking in 2024: Do you have an AI governance policy? (As though anyone had a clue how to govern whatever came flying out of the Pandora's box of unregulated AI.) Did you create a policy two years ago? What did it say? What's happened since then? How much difference has it made?
 

Listen, I'm not gonna tell you that you don't need one. But I'm also not gonna tell you that's all you need.

Everything about how we use our devices, information, and increasingly intelligent assistants is changing faster than most organizations can reasonably keep up with. And the billionaires building these systems aren't necessarily thinking about the particular responsibilities of a nonprofit housing provider.

 

We have residents to protect. Financial information to safeguard. Partnerships to honor. Regulatory obligations that don't disappear because an algorithm found a clever shortcut.

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Privacy is about who can see what. Who can add, change, share, or delete it. It's also about respect for our own work and everyone feeling dignity in their role. 

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Governance is about making those decisions real. That means access controls, boundaries, sandboxes, accountability, and people who understand how the whole thing works. Not just a PDF in the employee handbook.

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It also means staying in conversation with one another about what we're trying, what we're afraid of, what's working, and what isn't.

 

AI has made everyone's experience a little more individual. Two people can ask the same question and walk away with entirely different answers, each delivered with remarkable confidence. We need people we trust to compare notes with.

Working Together Is Actually a Thing

Let's not focus on maximizing efficiency.  Let's work on maximizing humanness.
 

We have the opportunity to collaborate and build trust among colleagues instead of each of us retreating into our own version of the truth. I don't mean corporate-speak collaboration. This is more about survival. Because if our neighborhood- and community-based nonprofits don't survive, we have so much at risk.
 

Decades of policy, programming, financing, advocacy, and plain hard work have gone into the affordable housing we've built across this country.

And the work isn't getting simpler.

Every stakeholder needs data. Every stakeholder holds a unique point of view. Every program carries its own dimensions and definitions. Each state has its own Qualified Allocation Plan and its own boutique of gap funding pools.
 

Every owner and operator has a preferred property management system. Every partnership has its special snowflake clauses. Every investor has its own special waterfall.

Sigh. This is our data. It may be an ugly, complicated monster, overly wrought with regulatory interpretation. But it is our monster. We've tried to tame it with spreadsheets but it only got more enormous. 

One Thing We Can Share
 

After 35 years in this industry, I've come to a conclusion. We don't need one chart of accounts.

Or one pro forma. Or one LIHTC application. We don't need to make every organization, state agency, investor, or property manager do things the same way.

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But there is one thing we need. A library of sorts. Our own Dewey Decimal System. Well-structured information in a central data repository. A database with the freedom for each organization to own, control, share and connect. Leveraging the reports you already get from Yardi or RealPage, made usable through a common data structure that we will continue to refine and improve.

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We can translate that into all sorts of things. All sorts of new human-built housing and human-conceived programs. Our state's QAP. An investor's reporting template. A board summary. A portfolio dashboard. A forecast.

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That's the foundation I've built. Not to become a billionaire, but to help all y'all escape the cycle of starting from scratch every time. A new Excel workbook with no central data source is not going to be part of anyone's solution.

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For smaller nonprofits this means benefiting from what we've already figured out. It means continuity during staff or project transitions. It means adaptability as AI continues to evolve. It means changing the value of data to your terms to serve your mission. And letting go of the rest.

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And it's why I want a cohort, not just customers.

Keystone Solution 

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What Two Cents has built is essentially a database. Not just any database, but a data schema ready to connect to your portfolio, your existing software, and at your pace and budget. We call it Keystone and we built it on Microsoft, because you don't need to integrate yet another new system. 

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We're inviting a cohort of nonprofit clients into a paid Keystone Pilot program. It's six months and it's one hell of a bargain.

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We're giving our first pilot clients something we've spent years building: their own Keystone database and Dataverse schema, including the right to keep and build on that foundation long after the pilot ends.

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We provide the Keystone database as part of the pilot. You will start seeing your daily tasks, properties, and residents in a new way. Our storytelling apps and decision-making dashboards give you a whole gamut of tools to explore.

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You get to learn how a larger network of similar nonprofits are building on the same foundation.
 

The experience will leave you more knowledgeable and connected. You will be better acquainted with your portfolio. You will meet some nice people. Perhaps most importantly, you will be free to choose.

We built Keystone because it is the most expensive thing you need. For smaller nonprofits, this is your fighting chance. After the Pilot We won't leave you with an empty app to populate or an export of disconnected and unrelated tables. You will have your own Dataverse schema.

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You choose whether to stick with Two Cents and use our fabulous solutions, or go off and build your own fabulous set of tools, but with a governed—and governable—dataset. You'd be vibe coding and creating your own Copilots in no time.
 

Keystone is your data, with a portal to so much more.

It's what I've wanted for 30 years.

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In the Eye of the Data Storm

When I jumped into the deep end of the machine learning pool a few years ago, I could smell adventure ahead. The work became an iterative cycle of testing, using, clarifying, and refining, which led me into more admin centers than I care to admit. Fourteen admin portals at Microsoft alone. And that's just the ones I know now. 

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Following the tide and surfing the waves of AI, learning the language of the mothership (Microsoft), training assistants only to have them turn into agents with behavior issues ... it's been a journey not many citizen developers have survived.

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Some days it's been exhilarating. Some days it's been ridiculous.

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And sometimes the technology moves so quickly that what seemed like a breakthrough on Tuesday is obsolete by Friday.

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I think I've found an eye in the center of this data storm, and I want to hold that space for all y'all to join me. We will swap stories and ease the pain of reporting as we see what happens when we share a single source of certain truths.

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A common tool for the people's data. None of us could build it alone.

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Whatever we do with the time we free up? That's up to us.

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