ChangeUs — Civic Engagement Platform

Founded ChangeUs Inc. — a full-stack civic engagement platform connecting citizens with local government through AI-enhanced policy analysis, representative lookup, and community organizing tools. Pending patent (U.S.) for AI-Enhanced Civic Engagement technology. Incorporated as a Delaware C-Corp with EIN, bylaws, and operating agreements.

Designed and built the complete full-stack architecture: a Next.js frontend (Vercel) with interactive district maps (Mapbox GL), representative profiles, and community tools. An async FastAPI backend (SQLAlchemy 2.0 / asyncpg) with PostgreSQL + PostGIS for geographic district lookups ("who represents me at this address?") and MinIO object storage, self-hosted behind a Cloudflare tunnel. Messages send via the user's own Gmail (OAuth), billing runs on Stripe credits, and a four-stage entity finder grounds every AI answer against a live source before it reaches a user.

Built an AI-powered policy analysis engine that takes proposed legislation text and generates plain-language summaries, identifies affected demographics, estimates fiscal impact, and highlights potential constitutional concerns. The engine uses GPT-4 with custom system prompts trained on legislative language patterns, combined with a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline that pulls relevant precedent from a vector database of historical legislation. This is the core innovation covered by the pending patent — using AI to bridge the gap between complex legislative language and citizen understanding.

Developed civic engagement workflow tools: petition creation with signature verification (email + SMS OTP), automated letter-to-representative generation (AI drafts personalized letters based on user's concerns + representative's committee assignments + relevant legislation), event organizing with RSVP tracking and calendar integration, and a civic engagement score that gamifies participation (attending town halls, contacting representatives, voting in elections) to drive sustained engagement beyond election cycles.

Handled all business formation and operations: Delaware C-Corp incorporation, EIN registration, bylaws and operating agreement drafting, shareholder equity structure, USPTO provisional patent application for AI-Enhanced Civic Engagement methods, and pitch deck preparation for seed funding conversations. This end-to-end founder experience — from legal entity formation through product architecture to patent filing — demonstrates the ability to own and drive a project from concept to company.