CARIN Community Platform

Decentralized tools for neighborhood-level crisis response, coordination, and mutual aid

CARIN, short for Community Action Response and Information Network, was a rapid-response software initiative launched in March 2020 during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The goal was to help communities self-organize when existing systems were overwhelmed, unclear, or too slow to respond.

CARIN was built around a simple idea: neighborhoods should have accessible tools for sharing information, coordinating volunteers, tracking needs, and supporting one another without waiting for top-down infrastructure to catch up.

The platform was built with WordPress, membership tools, and a customized geographic interface using OpenStreetMap. It allowed neighborhoods and community groups to create place-specific dashboards for crisis response and resource coordination.

Each dashboard could display local businesses, service availability, resource requests, volunteer support, and community updates.

The system also included social tools such as direct messaging, shared calendars, forums, and member-based access controls. Privacy and visibility were structured around roles and community membership, allowing someone to belong to a neighborhood group, a citywide community, or a more specialized volunteer network.

A major design priority was accessibility.

The system was intended for community leaders, mutual-aid organizers, and neighborhood volunteers who might not have much technical experience. CARIN included implementation guides and lower-technical-barrier onboarding pathways so local groups could launch and manage support systems with greater independence.

The platform saw limited adoption during the pandemic and did not become a large-scale community network.

The work was still foundational for me. It gave me hands-on experience in civic design, decentralized coordination, GIS-based interfaces, mutual-aid modeling, and building software around real community needs rather than abstract product ideas.

For this work, I received the Ken Gass Community Builder Award.

Core Features

• Preconfigured dashboards for neighborhoods and cities
• Status maps for businesses, services, and resource requests
• Volunteer and resource-request coordination
• Built-in direct messaging, calendar sharing, and forums
• Tiered visibility based on user role and community membership
• Implementation guides for lower-technical-barrier onboarding
• Administrative tools for managing community spaces and member access

Project Media

Project Details

Role: Project leader, developer, designer
Built with: WordPress, MemberPress, OpenStreetMap
Scope: Crisis response infrastructure, neighborhood dashboards, mutual aid coordination
Status: Complete
Duration: Approximately 7 months