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We’ve helped more than 15,000 people get IDs through Project ID.
That’s a big number, and we talk about the numbers a lot, but the numbers aren’t the point.
The point is the young woman in Los Angeles, deaf, and living in a tent on Skid Row, who came to us for help. It took months to track down her birth certificate. Months of paperwork, follow-ups, and systems not designed to serve her. When we finally got her ID, she was able to move into safe and secure housing. A few weeks later, she came running up to our table, proud and smiling, to show off her new apartment ID.
She has a home, because we helped her prove she existed.
Or Randall, a veteran living in his van in a VA parking lot. I helped him get his ID, let him use my address so he could receive his bank card, and drove him to get a phone. A few days later, he called me and said, “I got two jobs.”
Like most of our veterans, he just needed a little help and then he was off and running.
Or the man in his fifties who sat in the passenger seat of my car and wept. No one had been able to help him get a birth certificate or ID in over 20 years. He had been shut out of every system, every opportunity. All because he couldn’t prove who he was.
Fifteen thousand people. Fifteen thousand moments like that.
And in the times we’re living in, the need is only growing.
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States are passing stricter voter ID laws. More people are unhoused, undocumented, recently released, or otherwise excluded. Natural disasters are hitting harder and more often, displacing families who lose everything, including their documents. And everywhere we go, the systems that are supposed to serve people are getting harder to navigate.
At Project ID, we help people get the documents they need to survive.
This work is deeply unglamorous. It mostly involves going to the DMV, possibly the least fancy thing a person can do. We spend long hours on hold with state agencies. We fill out countless forms. We spend our lives on phone calls and follow-ups.
But every time a person walks out of the DMV with a new ID, the world opens up a little.
Every one of those 15,000 IDs is a story.
Please donate today to help us write more ID stories this summer.

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