About Helping Hands Board

The problem it solves

A family at a school needs size 5 boys shoes by Monday. Someone in the community has a pair their child has outgrown. The generosity was never the hard part: the asking was. Asking a whole community out loud means telling a whole community that you are struggling, and most people would rather go without.

So the asking can be done on the family’s behalf, by someone who was going to hear about it anyway: the school office, the support worker, the person who runs the street group. A board can also let people ask for themselves. Either way, a request says what is needed, and who it is for stays nobody’s business unless they choose otherwise.

How it works

A board belongs to one community. Its admins post what is needed, and so do its members where the board allows that. Members see the list, and whoever can help claims the request rather than adding to a thread and hoping somebody reads it. An admin then emails the two sides to put them in touch, and marks it fulfilled once the thing has actually changed hands.

Claiming works on every board. Almost everything around it is a setting the admins decide: whether members can post and whether each post is approved first, whether a request carries a comment thread at all, and whether the person who posted is named. Those are their calls, not ours.

Why it is closed

You get into a board with an invite link from someone already in it, and there is no other way in. There is no directory of communities to browse, no public page for a request, nothing for a search engine to index, and no way for anyone outside a board to see what is on it. That boundary is enforced by the database itself rather than by the screens, so a bug in the app cannot widen it.

Your name is the only thing other members learn about you. Your email address signs you in, and no other member ever sees it. A board’s admins see it in one situation: when you claim a request, or post one yourself, so that they can write to you about it. The privacy page goes through all of it in detail.

What it is not

No money changes hands, and there is nothing to buy. There are no ratings, no leaderboards, and no record of who has asked for the most help: a board that keeps score stops being a place people are willing to ask. There is no feed, no recommendation, and nothing to scroll past the requests your own community has posted.