For Dani Lopez, a social entrepreneur and student in the Urban Studies Master’s program, the challenges of her youth plus lessons learned from working as a financial aid administrator led her to co-found a company to improve social services delivery.
Launched in September 2024, Lulo is a free app designed to enable low-income families using the federal WIC (Women, Infants, Children) program to maximize their monthly food benefits. Each state mandates brands, flavors, and sizes of approved foods, leading to frustration and over $1 billion in unredeemed benefits. With Lulo, a shopper can just open the app while at the store and see photos showing the exact products that are covered by WIC.
That sounds simple – and simplicity is a victory, when the alternative is scouring a 32-page document to find permitted beans, or five pages on eggs. WIC shoppers are busy parents, often single moms, who can save time, increase redemptions, and connect to other community resources through Lulo such as food pantries and diaper banks.
Making WIC easier to use could have a major impact, given that nationwide, only about half of those eligible for the program currently participate. The app works for New York State at present, with more states to come. And the need is clear, given that one in four children in New York City don’t know where their next meal will come from, and nearly three in four New Yorkers accrued debt from food costs over the past year.
“It’s kind of like all my life has brought me here,” said Dani, whose own family used WIC when she was a baby. “For most of my life, it’s felt like I’m cobbling things together, and I’m really not going anywhere specific. But then in retrospect, this makes total sense.” Not that her first app is her final destination; Dani’s journey in social entrepreneurship is just beginning.
Changing the System
Dani is a major fan of CUNY in general and SLU in particular. Her first time in a college classroom was as an elementary schooler, when she and her brother attended a U.S. History class at Hostos Community College alongside their mother. CUNY’s support for student parents stood out to Dani early on; now she recognizes it as part of the university’s role as an engine of economic mobility. At SLU, she’s a fan of Prof. Kafui Attoh and has taken four of his classes. She and her family as far back as her grandmother have been in unions, so the school feels like a natural fit.
“Kafui has been an amazing thought partner in this work, especially in leveraging our data for systems change,” Dani said. “Lulo is a venture with access to data that can really empower the WIC ecosystem. Our data can help WIC clinics and community-based social service organizations more effectively deploy their existing resources and provide advocates with the numbers and testimonials to make an effective case for WIC funding.” She mentioned that Prof. Attoh’s book Disrupting DC examines how Uber leveraged data — in that case, to crush competition — in the Washington, D.C. market.
After high school, Dani took college courses at Lehman College, and then got a full scholarship to Amherst College, where she earned a B.A. in Political Science and Government. Even though the private liberal arts school in Massachusetts has a small student body and a sizable endowment, Dani discovered that she felt more supported at Lehman, especially as a first-generation college student.
“What I really learned was that institutions, even when they have an abundance of resources, could still very easily fail students,” she said.
“My life story is basically how community and social organizations and educational systems really closed gaps that otherwise I would have fallen through, and allowed me to make the most of opportunities I could get, and to get more down the road,” she said, acknowledging the vital role that social service institutions including the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, the Dominican Women’s Development Center, and the public library have played in her life.
Bureaucracy’s Lessons
Dani said that as a kid, she translated between English and Spanish for her mom, “and then it became translating systems. And then the next question was: I can figure out how to jump through all these hoops, but why do we have to? What’s going on between the policy and theory and implementation?”
After college, she sought out jobs to help her understand issues with the delivery of human services. Working in the Office of Financial Aid at Teachers College of Columbia University and then managing the Excelsior Scholarship program at Hunter College honed her understanding of the logic of bureaucracies as well as their flaws, leading her to label herself a “recovering former bureaucrat.” A fellowship at the Robin Hood Foundation’s Blue Ridge Labs led her to meet and create with the three people who became her Lulo co-founders.
Dani believes systems can operate more efficiently for both the helpers and the helped. “I have a whole mental framework for the work that Lulo falls into. Lulo is really to me a case study,” she said. “There’s a model and framework I’m trying to prove about building a solution that is designed and centered on the beneficiaries and implementers of a program, while also improving benefits at a systemic level.”
In fact, the app was built in collaboration with over 100 WIC families. In its first six months, Lulo has been downloaded over 8,000 times and has fielded user interest from 47 states. That success is not luring Dani away from getting her M.A., however.
“SLU has been the most incredible academic experience,” she said. “There is no other place like this, where there is such respect and emphasis on our impact in the real world. That’s what is truly an education: not just understanding what has been and what we might like to be, but how do we build the world we want to see.”