Inspiration
Every year, approximately 200,000 service members transition out of the U.S. military. For many, leaving the service also means losing a close-knit community, shared identity, daily structure, and sense of purpose.
Research shows that veterans commonly experience a loss of military culture, community, and belonging during this transition. Strong social support is associated with better mental-health outcomes, yet veterans often lack an easy way to discover and connect with other veterans living nearby.
We built Heart of a Volunteer around one belief: veterans should be able to find their community before isolation becomes a crisis.
What it does
Heart of a Volunteer is a community-based mobile app that helps veterans discover and connect with other veterans nearby.
The app uses a Tinder-like discovery experience. Veterans browse profiles, review shared interests and military backgrounds, and indicate who they would like to meet. When two users express mutual interest, they match and can begin communicating through the app.
Users can find connections for friendship, fitness, volunteering, mentorship, professional networking, or everyday mutual support. Heart of a Volunteer also provides an emergency-support pathway connecting users with qualified crisis resources when peer support is not enough.
Connecting local veterans to rebuild belonging, purpose, and mutual support.
How we built it
We built the app around a simple three-step experience: discover, match, and connect.
Users create profiles containing information such as their interests, service background, approximate location, and what type of connection they are looking for. Our matching interface then presents nearby veteran profiles through an intuitive swipe-based experience.
When two veterans mutually choose to connect, the app creates a match and opens communication between them. We also incorporated privacy controls, approximate-location discovery, and access to emergency resources.
Our product decisions were informed by research on military transition, loneliness, social connectedness, peer support, and veteran suicide prevention.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was adapting familiar dating-app mechanics for a non-romantic community platform. The experience needed to feel intuitive without suggesting that every connection was romantic. We addressed this by emphasizing friendship, mentorship, volunteering, networking, fitness, and mutual support throughout the interface.
Location created another challenge. Proximity makes the app valuable, but displaying veterans’ exact locations would create serious privacy and safety concerns. We therefore designed the experience around approximate distance and voluntary location sharing.
We also had to distinguish peer support from professional intervention. Veterans can listen to and support one another, but users should not be expected to act as clinicians or emergency responders. The app therefore separates ordinary community connections from its crisis-resource pathway.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we built a functioning app that turns a broad social problem into a simple, usable experience.
Rather than waiting for veterans to actively seek mental-health treatment, Heart of a Volunteer makes connection feel ordinary and accessible. A user can open the app to find a workout partner, mentor, friend, volunteer opportunity, or someone who understands military life.
We are also proud that the app allows veterans to contribute as well as receive support. Every user can be someone seeking connection and someone capable of helping another veteran.
Most importantly, we created a product that treats veterans as members of a community—not merely as recipients of services or crisis statistics.
What we learned
We learned that military transition involves much more than finding civilian employment. Veterans can lose their community, identity, structure, and mission at the same time.
We also learned that the strongest version of our idea was not another social-media feed or directory. Veterans needed a direct and low-friction way to discover relevant people, express interest, and establish a mutual connection. Tinder-like matching provided a familiar interaction model for accomplishing that.
Finally, we learned that technology cannot create trust by itself. It can, however, overcome the discovery problem by helping two compatible veterans living near one another realize that the other exists.
What's next for Heart of a Volunteer
Our next step is to test the app with transitioning service members and veterans in one geographic community. Their feedback will help us improve profile design, matching criteria, privacy controls, messaging, and the overall user experience.
Future versions will include service verification, interest-based matching, local groups and events, volunteering opportunities, stronger moderation tools, trained peer-support partnerships, and more robust crisis-escalation protocols.
Our long-term vision is a trusted national platform powered by local relationships—helping every veteran find their people, rebuild purpose, and remain connected after service.
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