Our Story
The story of OneHeart and how that led to the idea of Gravitate.
OneHeart opened in 2021 with the mission of creating pathways out of poverty for those desiring to thrive. In 2024, we changed our mission statement to empowering people to overcome crisis and achieve self-sustainability. But no matter the verbiage of our mission statement, we believe every person deserves a chance to thrive regardless of their history, heritage, or circumstances. We help vulnerable individuals and families from marginalized populations in South Dakota overcome the challenges of poverty, abuse, addiction, and trauma by providing secure transitional housing and programming that empowers them to transform their lives and break negative cycles for future generations.
Our model was established on the notion that for people to be successfully employable, they first must be stable. We succeeded in mitigating barriers for the most common issues keeping people stuck in the crisis of poverty including transitional living, childcare, transportation, food, Wi-Fi, and more, all at no cost to the client, within a safe and secure environment. We also provided wrap-around intensive case management, space for partner providers to co-locate, and 24-hour life safety and residential support (preventing negative spheres of influence from compromising our guest's progress).
The result? The OneHeart model and design of our campus frees up mental bandwidth which can then be applied toward upward mobility (job/skill/education), and we guide our guests through our unique Options-Based Planning™ intervention predicated on Voice, Choice, and Empowerment, that advances their decision making and coping skills so people can stay employed and housed upon transitioning to the community from our campus. (See below for stories of what people have accomplished at OneHeart!)
Our results were so exciting that, of course, we wanted to do more. OneHeart has only 90 units available to support our target demographic and we recognized that we would never be able to serve and support everyone who needs or wants it. This, combined with significant and severe workforce deficiencies, made us realize we needed to devise a way to reach and develop more people within our target demographic to fill workforce needs. We identified a definite need within this population to have better access to the workforce in a more transformative way, and a definite need within the business world to hire in a more empowered way.
These factors, coupled with significant changes in the nonprofit funding landscape since opening in 2021 and struggling to find sustainable sources of funding despite our phenomenal results, led to the creation of Gravitate™.
Gravitate™ is an innovative employment platform
designed to evolve the way current job-seekers navigate the hiring process—in effect, making them more desirable to employers—and give employers a direct hand in making that happen.
Gravitate is the first of its kind, being a non-for-profit employment software as a service. Gravitate allows employers invaluable insight into candidates so they can make better-informed hiring decisions, and it is being designed to help candidates learn from what didn’t work so they can evolve and do better next time. No more no-call, no-shows for interviews or start-dates. Or, if they do, it will be reflected in their Gravitate Score for the next employer to see before they engage. No more time and money spent on non-serious, sometimes unqualified job candidates. No more having zero control over the process. And from a candidate’s perspective, no more not understanding why you didn’t get a call back from an employer after an interview. Gravitate is being designed to help make people smarter in their job-searching patterns, create more employable candidates, and employers a direct hand in making that happen.
Recently conducted focus groups of our target job-seeker demographic revealed that many people are hesitant to fill out job applications due to confusing application fields that vary greatly from employer to employer. Additionally, short employment periods and inconsistent employment dates on a resume do not paint a positive picture of a candidate and may tell a story that leads to incorrect employer assumptions. Another revealing topic was the lack of knowledge of interviewing norms, with our target audience unaware of the expectations of the hiring manager. These are folks with an untold story, in many cases of triumph, who are overlooked in a sea of candidates that may or may not be better choices.
And our hypotheses are correct. We polled employers and found they do dismiss candidates solely on inconsistent employment dates or poorly completed applications. They overlook candidates for their staffing needs because they cannot see the three-dimensional person. The standard resume cannot provide insight into the candidate’s initiative or determination and this incomplete picture can only lead to inferior hiring decisions. We can only conclude the employer result is poor employee retention and continuing hiring challenges.
Meet Gravitate. The employment platform created by OneHeart, a non-profit committed to the wellbeing of the individual. With this same mission at Gravitate, we pledge we will not gouge the employer by charging fees that may be fruitless or provide baseless candidate matches that waste time. We are eager to provide the only platform where the employer has insight into a candidate’s initiative and the intangible skills gained through life experiences. We want you to know the whole person before you commit to a long-term employer/employee relationship. And for the job-seeker, we pledge to provide a job-hunting experience that is easy and intuitive. Where you can showcase your character through life skills and job experiences. And when you need some tips on how to best present yourself, our tutorials are at your fingertips. Your success is our mission.
Our team is dedicated to the stability of the individual and the employer. Put Gravitate on your hiring team.
And Gravitate will grow to reach an ever-broadening audience. According to Baylor Scott & White Health, social media has made us more isolated. The ability to read body language cues to navigate societal systems (such as the hiring process) is growing dormant due to this isolation, making it more difficult to stand out as a job candidate, and further compounding current workforce deficits. This is not just a challenge for the overlooked, this is a challenge we’re seeing for the majority of the next generation, whom we aim to serve as this platform grows.
And last, if Gravitate has a fraction of the success of OneHeart’s programming and a fraction of the financial success of other employment platforms, it would secure OneHeart’s future, helping us transform lives long into the future.
OneHeart Success Stories
Kim
*Simon:
Interested in learning more about OneHeart
and/or Gravitate?
Please get in touch with us. We would love to chat with you.