It’s not always easy to get to know your community. Some stories, like Raising Cane’s in Baton Rouge, are widely known. Most of them remain a mystery. You’ve gone to the same local establishment all your life. Do you know how it was founded? LSU political science and international relations graduate Chris Cummings is using technology to bridge that gap with the Pass It Down app.
Inspired by his mother Barbara, who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1980 and who later developed early onset dementia, Cummings founded Pass It Down in 2015 as a platform for families to safeguard and tell their stories.
“The original vision was to be able to help families preserve family stories and memories with a digital biographer and then that vision expanded to helping communities and museums and other organizations that had stories, too,” Cummings said.
Cummings, who graduated from the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center in 2013, first started in tech development in 2007 when he co-founded an e-learning company with his dad called “Woople.” With Pass It Down, Cummings is meeting a universal need in the market that can help businesses and organizations connect with their patrons in simple and affordable way.
Pass It Down expanded from b-to-b, from business to business, to start licensing their platform to other organizations in the Spring of 2018. They launched their first platform for a city in February of 2018. Recently, Pass It Down was one of only 10 companies selected to be part of the Techstars Austin Accelerator Program, which accepted less than 1 percent of all companies that applied.
“We really believe communities’ stories matter and we believe that technology should bring people together, and that there’s this great opportunity that exists to get people to see the things that make our homes and our neighborhoods and our cities unique,” Cummings said.
The software could function in a touchscreen on the wall of a business lobby helping patrons explore the entire brand’s story and impact and be able to interact with a story map that does that. Moreover, cultural institutions around the world can utilize the technology to help them collect, organize and showcase their stories in an interactive and immersive form.
“Storytelling and the value of storytelling is a global need,” Cummings said. “We have a solution that’s needed not in the U.S., not in Canada, not in Mexico, but really in every country around the world. And we want to be a global company that’s helping bring stories to life in every country in the world.”
The Pass It Down app is not only satisfying a demand in the market but also helping cities close cultural gaps and bringing representation to minorities. The technology allows anyone in the community to submit their own story or their own perspective, which is important because, according to Cummings, they found there’s a gigantic need for more diverse stories.
“One of the cities that we’ve worked with and have been in talks with for a while, the city’s archives were 99.2 percent Caucasian despite the city being 33 percent African American, so there’s this gigantic gap in terms of the demographic makeup of the city and the stories that the city has about the city and the people of the city,” Cummings said. “We can’t fix it overnight, but we can start to chip away at it through our platform.”

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Courtesy of Chris Cummings

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