This week’s 1 Million Cups at the Kauffman Foundation offered startup pitches for two online platforms—one that supports crowdfunding of civic projects and another that tracks health symptoms of pediatric asthma patients.

First onstage was Jase Wilson, founder of Neighbor.ly, which connects communities to project funding and people to projects that they would like to fund.

How it works: Governments, organizations and nonprofits post projects on Neighbor.ly for community members to financially support. That support has been in the form of donations, but Neighbor.ly is wants to allow users to invest money in civic projects (and possibly reap a return) as well.

Wilson said that his passion was “helping communities help themselves” and that his goal for Neighbor.ly was to have 1,000 communities be able to fund 10,000 projects by raising $1 billion.

Since his initial pitch at 1 Million Cups in August 2012, Wilson has secured key funding from sources on the West and East Coasts, he said, but all funding requests for Neighbor.ly in Kansas City and St. Louis have been turned down.

“It’s not a critique of what we’re doing here yet,” Wilson said of the local rejection, but “why do we have to go to the coasts to get validated?”

Symptom.ly at 1 Million Cups

Next up was Derek Bereit, founder of mobile health startup Symptom.ly, a Web-based dashboard for health care providers and their patients to track patient-entered health symptoms.

The company’s first clinically validated app for smart phones is eAsthmaTracker for children with asthma. The product’s bottom line is to dramatically decrease repeated emergency room visits from pediatric asthma patients by carefully tracking their day-to-day symptoms. Instead of having to be rushed to the hospital, patients can be treated by making appointments with doctors as needed.

“The vast majority of hospital readmissions are avoidable by medication adherence and symptom tracking …” Bereit said. “At the end of the day, it’s all about patient engagement.”