MutualAid.world Local Organizer Needs

Organizers: Please tell us what kind of functionality you would like from an app. Dream big. If you want to keep in touch about how we are integrating your particular request join the slack (particularly the #community_users channel). Also feel free to put your name and/or contact info as a comment attached to what you share. We will do our best to be in direct relationship with you individually as we move. But the primary point of contact for our relationships between organizers and developers is that slack channel. Love and Solidarity <3

• We need peer-to-peer giving that supports and does not detract from the creation of long term resilient community infrastructure.

  • We don't want people to use a peer-to-peer app instead of looping into local organizer efforts. Is there a way for the app to prompt peer-to-peer givers to join local efforts? IDEA: What if, after making a peer-to-peer connection, the user was given info about their local mutual aid org? Or even info about local orgs related to the type of exchange? For example, if you agree to provide mental health support for someone, you get info about the local mental health crises hotline

• We want to group requests by type and urgency.

  • So you could see, for example, all requests for food, or all requests for childcare, etc. And you could see how urgent it was

• We want to see our community’s aggregate needs

  • So we could see, for example, that 20 people needed toilet paper, 10 people needed inhalers, and so on. This will help them build long term solutions to persistent needs.

• We need access for those who aren’t on the internet. Elderly use their phones and are comfortable making calls. Can we have a centralized number that then plugs into the larger tech solutions that y’all are coming up with. Call-takers can sign up when they are available (like an Uber driver does) and they then can connect Callers to Volunteers in their communities (hyper-locally). Volunteers call the Neighbor in Need and are outfitted with Best Practices, a series of topics that need to be discussed and Local Resources that can be shared with the caller. We like the idea of it being a one-to-one trusting relationship. We want the elder to have a real person answering their call and calling back.