MAMAS: Pods, Phone Trees, and Spreadsheets

Mutual Aid Medford and Somerville (MAMAS) was started in March 2020 by a group of friends in their twenties — Hannah Freedman, Sophia Grogan, Miriam Priven, and Anna Kaplan — and became one of the Boston area's most effective COVID networks using a stack any block could copy by Friday: neighborhood phone trees; geographic pods mapping neighbors to nearby neighbors; a Google Form for help requests; shared offerings spreadsheets; and a multilingual Google Voice hotline. Grocery runs, prescription pickups, childcare, spare rooms, redistributed funds.

They published replication instructions — including how to draw pod boundaries — and open-sourced the small utilities they did write. The deliberate minimalism was the point: no accounts, no apps, nothing to install, nothing between a neighbor and help but a phone number and a nearby person. As the lead engineer of a fellow COVID network put it: 'If we were depending on an app or online form submissions we would miss a huge swath of people in need.'

What it teaches: the pod-plus-phone-tree-plus-spreadsheet architecture is the mutual aid reference design. Technology's job in it is bookkeeping; the pods — nearby neighbors bound to nearby neighbors — are the actual system. Any builder adding features should first ask what the phone tree can't already do.

Details

• era: 2020–present
• place: Medford & Somerville, Massachusetts
• tech stack: phone trees, geographic pods, Google Forms, spreadsheets, multilingual hotline
• source note: Founders and stack per Boston Magazine; the anti-solutionism quote is from Invisible Hands' lead engineer Matt Schaff (Vice), not a MAMAS slogan.
• practice kind: story