We are families showing up for families.

Our story

Why I started Nexus

Nexus started with a phone call from my grandma. She asked how I would feel about helping to advocate for making birth more affordable in the United States. With my background in advocacy work, I saw it as a chance to do something I was passionate about, and maybe change things for the better for the many women who fall into the gap where they no longer qualify for public health coverage but still face steep out-of-pocket costs to give birth in a hospital.

That call became the Zero Cost Birth movement, which we also called Birth Not Bills. At first we were drafting policy proposals, hoping to get enough people on board to have a bill introduced. Shortly after we started, we found that a bill was already making its way through Congress, the Supporting Healthy Moms and Babies Act, so we decided to advocate for it and help bring awareness to it. Along the way, I realized there were legal requirements around collecting donations for lobbying that I hadn't taken into account.

That led me to look at what else I could do with the knowledge and skills I had, and whether I could help other families who were struggling the way ours has. I used my degree to research what families are actually struggling with, things like navigation burden: all the calls, forms, documents and offices it takes to turn help that exists on paper into help that actually arrives. Then I looked for ways to help fill those gaps with only what I had: knowledge and time.

So Jewell and I got to work. We read government documents to learn how to apply for 501(c)(3) status, what to file with the state, how to keep track of finances, how to file I-9s and everything else. Our 501(c)(3) status was approved in 2026, effective January 9. I programmed the website, and Jewell helped shape the idea and did all of the graphic design, along with our logos.

The first thing we built went straight at the problem I'd been researching. Food pantries, clinics, diaper banks, rent and utility help, and benefit programs already exist, but they're spread across a lot of different websites and phone numbers. We gathered them from public records and sorted them by county, and today there's a page for each of 3,167 counties across every state, with the address, phone number, hours and who each program is for.

We also looked at what was already happening close to home. In the Kansas City area, neighbors were handing down cribs, passing along coats and driving each other to appointments, but so much of that help got lost in crowded social media groups. So we built a free item tracker where families could pass on what their kids had outgrown, and it grew into the Family Barter System. Families post what they're giving away, a family nearby claims it, and the two of them set up the pickup through private messages on the site. Later we added a way for families to ask for something they need, so neighbors can see it.

From there, we kept building around the places where families lose time or lose help. We added free email reminders before benefits like food stamps and Medicaid have to be renewed, and a two-minute check on every county page that shows which programs a family probably qualifies for. We also built the Burden Meter, where families can tell us how dealing with a benefits office went, so we can start measuring navigation burden. And we kept advocating: our petition for the Supporting Healthy Moms and Babies Act is still open on our Take Action page.

Along the way, Cara Paugh joined us as our secretary. She's a mom of three who was home with them full time, so she knows firsthand what families run short of and when.

Everything so far has been built with what we had, which was knowledge and time. What we're working toward is bigger: community centers for families, with spaces for teens, and a real community of families who can count on each other.

Kaylynn Rohde, Executive Director