Suma friends, we are springtime excited to share with you the latest news about the suma platform, an app that helps low-income people buy and save money on essential expenses: food, transportation, utilities. Building off the app’s successful holiday special, we’re developing a series of summer special events that:

• Respond to app user feedback requesting more food savings options. In a recent survey, 87.5% of suma app users said they want the app to save them money on groceries.
• Leverage our growing clean mobility partnerships to offer users access to e-scooter services at reduced costs and with community-based privacy standards.

At summer special events, community members access affordable e-scooter services via the suma app and join an organized ride from a convenient community location to a nearby farmers market. At the market, community members access affordable fruits, vegetables and other market products via the suma app, then join an organized e-scooter ride back to their community location.

We are working with community partners like Home Forward, Uprise Collective, Hacienda CDC, Verde, Community Cycling Center and others to make projects happen in North, NE and SE Portland in July and August.

And we’re building the suma app for todo la comunidad, so we want to make sure that many users can benefit from these events, including adults living with a disability, families with children and community members who may not have visited a farmers market before. This means we plan to offer other transportation options, ask community members about their accommodations during pre-event outreach, and develop other ways to make participants feel welcome and supported.

Stay tuned for more updates from suma and join us, our users, our partners and our vendors as we build community, reduce costs, and promote summertime access to healthy food and clean mobility.