Build: Phone-First Mutual Aid Intake

Build the intake-and-dispatch layer for a small mutual aid network, honoring the two hardest-won lessons of the COVID networks.

Phone-first. The front door is a phone number (voice and text) plus a paper flyer that says so. A web form exists but is the secondary door. Every request — 'a week of groceries,' 'ride to the pharmacy,' 'someone to shovel' — becomes a ticket with a rough location (block, not address, until claimed), needs, and language preference.

A claimable board. Volunteers see open tickets near them and claim one — the Bed-Stuy Strong mechanic that made 30 deliveries a day feel human: one neighbor takes responsibility for one neighbor, start to finish, with a check-in when it's done.

Data minimization as architecture, not policy. Collect only what fulfillment needs; addresses visible only to the claiming volunteer; tickets auto-purge after completion; export is a decision two stewards make together, not a button. The COVID networks learned that a spreadsheet of vulnerable neighbors is a liability to protect, not an asset to grow — design as if the least trustworthy future volunteer will someday have the password.

Dashboard: open needs, average time-to-claim, and thanks — read aloud at the monthly meeting, because the ledger of care is also a story of us.

Details

• builds on: bed-stuy-strong, mamas-pods, design-for-care-not-enforcement
• guardrails: phone number in front, app in back, block-level location until claimed, auto-purge completed tickets, two-steward rule for any export
• practice kind: prompt