It started in everyday life in San Francisco, years before HELPP Network had a name that fit.
Starting around 2004, as a psychology undergraduate at the University of San Francisco living in the city, Genevieve had repeated encounters with unhoused neighbors — not one moment, but many, woven into ordinary life around San Francisco. What she saw wasn't just hardship — it was ingenuity: people surviving with real creativity, in conditions that gave them almost nothing to work with. Those encounters, accumulated over time, planted a seed that took twenty years, three names, and a graduate degree to grow into HELPP Network.
A University of San Francisco undergrad, studying psychology and living in the city, has repeated encounters with unhoused neighbors as part of everyday life — not a single moment, but many, over time. The idea that would become HELPP starts here — not as a business plan, but as a question that wouldn't let go.
Four years as a Research Associate and Project Administrator at UCSF (2006–2010), followed by two years as Executive Assistant and Project Coordinator with the City and County of San Francisco's Department of Children, Youth and Their Families (2010–2012). Genevieve learns the systems side of the problem she'd only seen from the outside.
Genevieve returns to personal training and hands-on health work, staying close to the people she's trying to serve rather than only studying the systems around them.
Genevieve has navigated her own family's hardest seasons — including single parenthood and stretching to make ends meet within a larger family. She has struggled the way many of the people HELPP exists to serve struggle. That's not a talking point; it's why the framework insists that "not right now" is a legitimate answer.
Genevieve founds Transcendfit Health and Wellness, LLC. In 2024, she writes the first formal proposal for what she then called the Health Education and Life Preservation Program — a comprehensive, if still-forming, vision for integrated housing, health, and community.
Direct volunteer work with Positivity Tribe, formal graduate research at Touro University, and the eventual formalization of the Dynamic Flourishing Hierarchy sharpen two decades of accumulated thinking into HELPP Network as it exists today. The name changed more than once along the way. The throughline — matching real strength to real need — never did.
Genevieve's 2026 graduate research at Touro University built the current HELPP concept by synthesizing existing data on homelessness and holistic health — drawing on the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Tipping Point Community, LeSar Development Consulting, and Fremont's Housing Navigation Center.
Since 2024, Genevieve has volunteered directly with Positivity Tribe, assembling and distributing wellness kits to unhoused individuals — the practical thread that keeps the framework grounded in real need and real human dignity.
HELPP Network exists to connect people — one person, one home, one community at a time — to the resources, guidance, and community they need at whatever level of the Dynamic Flourishing Hierarchy they're currently standing on. We bridge and strengthen an existing ecosystem of aligned organizations rather than duplicating it, and we vet every listing for genuine alignment with Dynamic Flourishing, not for size, tax status, or sector.
Where Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs treats "self-actualization" as a fixed peak to reach, we start from a different premise: flourishing isn't a destination you arrive at once. It's the ongoing, dynamic capacity to operate authentically within real life as it actually is — with all its instability, setbacks, and change. An organization or a person doesn't "graduate" from needing support; what they need simply shifts, and our role is to help meet people where that shift has actually put them.
Any organization genuinely doing aligned work — regardless of sector, size, or whether their services are free, fee-based, or both — can be listed in our directory. Being listed costs nothing, for the organization or for the person using our site to find them.
Having worked inside government systems and navigated community-based organizations as a consumer, Genevieve has seen firsthand how scarcity and disconnection between well-meaning organizations can make it harder — not easier — for people to actually get help. HELPP exists to counter that: to point people toward services that are real, responsive, and actually follow through.
Beyond the directory, HELPP allocates its own donations and funding toward sliding-scale and full-scholarship access to programs and events for people from disenfranchised and underestimated backgrounds — seats that would otherwise be out of reach. This is a growing part of our work, funded by HELPP directly, and it will continue to expand.
HELPP Network is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation, fiscally sponsored by IFERS. Our founder is also involved in a separate for-profit business — a fact we're glad to be transparent about, because it is entirely distinct from HELPP Network's nonprofit structure, governance, and mission. Conflating the two doesn't reflect how either organization actually operates.
We are a young organization, and we expect the questions that come with being young — about our structure, our funding, our history. We welcome those questions. Transparency isn't a talking point for us; it's the standard we hold every organization in our directory to, and it's the standard we hold ourselves to first. We will keep doing this work — not for recognition, but because the mission is worth it.