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The HELP app: a live map of who needs what, and who can bring it.

Built in Orange, Texas by people who have run a response out of a church parking lot with a clipboard and a dying phone. Free for residents, free for volunteers, free for every agency working beside us.

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The problem

The help exists. The routing doesn't.

Within 48 hours of a major storm there are more willing hands than there are ways to point them at the right door. Requests arrive as Facebook comments, texts to a volunteer's personal number, and handwritten notes that get rained on.

Meanwhile a volunteer with a tractor sits idle because nobody knew he had a tractor. A woman on oxygen goes three days unvisited because her road off the highway didn't make it onto anyone's list. Two crews show up to the same house while the next block waits a week.

This is not a shortage of goodwill. It is a data problem wearing a disaster costume.

The approach

Match the ask to the ability.

Every request becomes a task on a map with a priority, a time window, and a list of what it actually takes to finish: the skills, the resources, and the companions.

  • Skills — certifications and abilities a volunteer brings: chainsaw, climber, demo, electrician, carpentry, medical, mechanic, staging.
  • Resources — operator classifications, license types, and equipment with quantities: saws, generators, trailers, heavy equipment, vehicles, attachments.
  • Companions — the animal partners that work alongside responders in terrain machines can't reach.

Volunteers list theirs once. Tasks ask for the same vocabulary. The map does the rest.

Working today

Not a concept. A running application.

Map

An interactive map of tasks, hubs and hazards with address search and drawing tools, so a coordinator can see the whole response at a glance and create work right where it is needed.

Hubs

Response hubs classified by type — fire department, church, nonprofit, business — and by the services they offer: food, medical, communications, drop-off, charging. Each has a dashboard with weather, roster, storage and deliveries.

Feed

A live activity stream over WebSockets. When a volunteer joins a task, a hub opens, or a situation changes, everyone sees it immediately.

Profiles & matching

Volunteer profiles organized around Skills, Resources and Companions, with equipment quantities and travel availability, so dispatch stops being a guess.

Development timeline

From clipboard to coordination.

Six phases. Two are done. Here's the rest — and what each one costs.

  1. Phase 0 · 2025 Shipped

    Foundation

    The skeleton everything else hangs on: accounts and sessions, a mobile-first shell with four tabs, a live map, and real-time sync so two coordinators never work from different truths.

    Delivered

    • Mobile-first app shell with Profile, Feed, Hub and Map
    • Username and password accounts with persistent sessions
    • Interactive Leaflet map with address search and creation tools
    • Task and hub creation, with a shared validated data model
    • Live updates over WebSockets across every connected device
  2. Phase 1 · Late 2025 – Early 2026 Shipped

    Skills, Resources & Companions

    The matching engine, and the vocabulary that makes it work. Registration was cut to the essentials so a volunteer can sign up standing in a driveway; everything else moved into the profile.

    Delivered

    • Two-minute registration; deep profile afterward
    • Profiles organized into Skills, Resources and Companions
    • Task creation that asks for the same three things, in the same words
    • Equipment with quantities and custom icons, managed centrally
    • Hub types and hub services, with distinct map markers
    • Task priority levels, open/close time windows and safety notes
    • Consolidated hub dashboard: weather, roster, storage, deliveries
  3. Phase 2 · Now – Q1 2027 In progress

    Field beta

    Everything that separates a demo from a tool you can trust at hour six of a deployment, when the towers are congested, the battery is at 11%, and nobody has time to read a manual.

    Scope

    • Offline-first: queue work on the device, sync when signal returns
    • Dispatcher console for assigning, batching and closing tasks at scale
    • Before/after photo evidence and completion verification on every task
    • SMS fallback so volunteers without data still get assignments
    • Roles and permissions: resident, volunteer, crew lead, hub manager, dispatcher
    • Incident scoping, so a response has a start, an end and a report
    • Independent security review and penetration test before any public data
    $48,000 engineering, hosting, SMS gateway and security review
    Fund this phase
  4. Phase 3 · 2027 Next

    Public launch

    Out of the pilot and into the app stores, in the languages Southeast Texas actually speaks, usable by someone with one hand free and a cracked screen.

    Scope

    • Native iOS and Android releases, plus an installable web app
    • Accessibility pass to WCAG 2.2 AA, including screen-reader field use
    • Spanish and Vietnamese throughout
    • Self-service onboarding for churches, agencies and partner nonprofits
    • Volunteer screening and background-check integration for home-entry work
    • Training materials, printable quick-cards and a hub starter kit
    $65,000 mobile builds, translation, accessibility audit and store compliance
  5. Phase 4 · 2028 Planned

    Interoperability

    A response involves a dozen organizations that each keep their own list. The app is only worth what it can share, so this phase is about opening it up rather than walling it in.

    Scope

    • A documented open API and webhooks for partner systems
    • Two-way exchange with the case-management tools Texas VOAD members already run
    • County emergency-operations dashboards — Orange County first — and read-only public views
    • Exports formatted for agency and grant reporting
    • Hub analytics: supply burn-down, unmet need, response time by block
    $40,000 integration engineering and partner onboarding
  6. Phase 5 · 2029 and beyond Horizon

    The resilience layer

    The hardest days are the ones with no cell service at all. This is the work that makes the app useful before a storm and during the blackout, not only after.

    Scope

    • Device-to-device sync and satellite messaging where networks are down
    • Year-round mutual-aid mode for the 360 days that aren't a disaster
    • Training, certification and readiness tracking for volunteer crews
    • Rapid damage assessment from aerial and street imagery
    • Pre-storm staging: position gear and crews before landfall
    To be scoped funded by grants and multi-year partners
Our commitment. The HELP app will never carry advertising, never sell volunteer or resident data, and never charge a community to use it during a disaster. If HELP ever stops maintaining it, the code goes to the responders who depend on it.

Why donors fund software

A quarter of our budget buys the other three quarters more reach.

Software is the least photogenic thing we do and one of the highest-leverage. A crew that is routed well finishes three houses in the time a guessing crew finishes one. A hub that knows its own inventory stops turning people away for water it has in the back.

And because we give it away, every dollar you put into the build also funds the church two counties over that will never be on our payroll or our roster.

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Want it in your county?

We're choosing field-beta partners now, starting in Orange County and working outward — churches, fire departments, VOADs and community groups who will use it for real and tell us where it breaks.

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