Human Essentials
Free, open-source inventory and distribution software built by volunteers for diaper and essentials banks — 200+ banks run on it. The warehouse version of the community pantry ledger.
Human Essentials is what happens when a volunteer developer community (Ruby for Good) adopts an unglamorous, essential problem: diaper banks and essentials banks running their inventory on paper and memory. Built with the PDX Diaper Bank in Portland, Oregon, it now serves 200+ registered banks across the US — inventory, distributions, partner agencies, barcode scanning, reporting — free, MIT-licensed, and recognized as a Digital Public Good.
It earns its shelf spot for two reasons. As a tool: any mutual aid operation that stores and distributes *things* (a community fridge network, a supply hub, a disaster cache) eventually needs exactly this shape of software, and this one is free and maintained. As a story: it's the standing proof that volunteer open-source labor, pointed at a real operator's real workflow and sustained for years, produces civic infrastructure — the opposite of the hackathon prototype that dies by Monday.
Neighborhood remix: scale it down from warehouse to porch — a community fridge and pantry ledger tracking what came in, what's running low, and which partner households need a knock.
Details
- maker: Ruby for Good (volunteer nonprofit)
- hosted: free hosted service
- license: MIT
- repo url: https://github.com/rubyforgood/human-essentials
- remix idea: The community fridge ledger, scaled from warehouse to porch.
- practice kind: tool
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Build prompt
Build: A Front-Porch Digest for One Block
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Build: A Living Asset Map
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Build: A Third-Places Map for Your Neighborhood
A starter build: a local Ushahidi — neighbors collectively map the porches, stoops, cafés, courts, and corners where the neighborhood…
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Build: Adopt-a-Thing for Your Block
A starter build: the Adopt-a-Hydrant pattern, remixed — a map of small civic objects (tree wells, storm drains, benches, little libraries)…
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Build prompt
Build: Participatory Budgeting for a Very Small Budget
A starter build: run real participatory budgeting on a block association's actual money — propose, develop, vote, do — sized so the whole…
Contributed by Ruby for Good & PDX Diaper Bank · humanessentials.app
Original source: https://humanessentials.app/
See something to fix or add? Suggest an edit on GitHub — the commons lives in git too, and its history is the changelog.
local-civic-techcivic-tech-toolmutual-aidinventoryopen-source