Hacktive Labs, Inc. · 501(c)(3) nonprofit
In uniform, nobody had to make the first move.
Hacktive Labs provides a free smartphone application that keeps veterans in regular contact with other veterans. You pick a time of day. At that time the app calls you, and connects you with a peer who picked the same time. There is no roster to work through and no number to dial. You only have to answer.
Connection used to be part of the job
In service, staying in touch with the people around you was not a task anyone had to remember. You were housed together, you worked together, and somebody noticed if you went quiet. Discharge ends the structure and leaves the need. From then on, contact depends on somebody deciding to reach out, and that decision gets harder in exactly the weeks when it matters most. Calling first means guessing whether you are interrupting, wondering whether the person on the other end remembers you the way you remember them, and risking no answer at all.
The numbers say this is common rather than personal.
50%
greater likelihood of survival for people with stronger social relationships
The VA's own review of contributing factors in veteran suicide, published in its 2025 annual report, lists relationship problems among the most frequently documented, and notes that the opportunity this points to is strengthening relational resources.
We are careful about what those figures do and do not prove. Nobody should claim that a scheduled phone call prevents a death, and we do not. What we claim is narrower and testable: isolation is one of the conditions named in the data, connection is the part of it that can actually be built, and the thing standing between a veteran and a conversation is usually the act of placing the call. That is the part we removed. The research behind the approach is laid out on our Why peers page.
What we provide
A free app that turns staying in touch from something you have to initiate into something that simply happens:
Step one
Choose your time
Pick the point in the day when a conversation would do the most good. Plenty of people choose the hour that tends to be the longest one.
Step two
The app calls you
At that time your phone rings, and so do the phones of other veterans who chose the same time. Nobody has to be the one who reached out first, because nobody reached out.
Step three
Answer, and you are talking
Whoever answers is connected one to one with another veteran, each introduced by the name they chose. Answer, and you are guaranteed to reach someone: backup members stand ready so that nobody answers into silence.
The service is free to the veterans who use it. Video is there when both people want it, and everything works over an ordinary phone call for anyone who would rather not use an app at all. Organizations get the same machinery: we can ring an entire group into its standing call together, so a weekly check-in does not depend on one volunteer with a contact list.
Where we are today
Hacktive Labs is a young organization and we would rather say plainly where things stand than dress it up. The calling platform is built and in beta testing. Our work now is program design for veterans specifically, and preparing first pilots with organizations that already have veterans' trust: veteran service organizations, vet centers, county veteran service offices, and veteran-focused nonprofits. Those pilots exist to find out whether this delivers the connection the research points to, and we will report what we find either way.
If you work with veterans and want to talk about an early pilot, or you are a veteran who wants to be among the first members, we would like to hear from you.
Write to us
A real person reads every message and replies. Veterans who want to be among the first members, organizations that serve veterans and want to talk about a pilot, funders, volunteers, and people who just have a question: all of it is welcome.