About CORD
CORD — Community Oriented Resource Directory — is civic infrastructure for finding and sustaining local care. Food, housing, health, safety, transit, legal aid, and community support gathered in one place, so help can be located without a phone call tree, an appointment, or an institution’s permission.
Mapping essential resources is the foundation: establishing reliable, open reference points for local care in each city. From there, CORD grows as community relationships take root. Upcoming tools—such as a shared events calendar, organizer bulletin board, and mutual aid coordination—are co-designed with local organizers to reflect what communities actually need, now and for collective futures.
85
public datasets behind the resource listings, plus community additions, documented city by city
5
cities in the network with their own resource maps and origin points
Open Access
free to use and no account required
01
Built for the informal helper
Most care arrives through neighbors, street outreach workers, mutual aid volunteers, and block stewards walking alongside someone too overwhelmed to navigate institutional directories alone. The map is arranged around that accompaniment: one-tap calls, walking and transit directions, intake hours, ID requirements, and the languages spoken at a door.
02
Listings drawn from public knowledge
Resource listings are compiled from 85 public datasets spanning city agencies, health systems, libraries, schools, and mutual aid networks. Every source behind every city — the categories it covers and the number of listings drawn from it — is documented on the Listing Sources page. Listings marked illustrative are sample data holding a place in the map until a verified record replaces them.
03
Development shaped alongside organizers
Features are not built ahead of the communities meant to use them. Each phase begins with neighborhood organizers and mutual aid groups, and every tool is measured against what a place already runs. The phased roadmap is published at the foot of the homepage, including the features still open to co-design.
04
Vetted organizers, not open posting
Relief drives, emergency funds, and mutual aid offerings are posted only by onboarded, vetted organizers. Onboarding is relational rather than procedural: trust and local accountability come first. The gate keeps unvetted campaigns, predatory scams, and chaotic drop-off requests away from people already in crisis.
05
Holding steady between crises
Institutional aid moves slowest in the first seventy-two hours, when neighborhood ties carry most of the load. Organizers act as durable local nodes — physical and relational points of contact, including offline — and curated lists export to high-contrast printable guides that keep working when batteries and cell networks do not. Those same relationships are what keep mutual aid groups standing after the surge of attention passes.
Where CORD is Active
Each city opens onto its own resource map. Coverage begins wherever community connections currently exist, and CORD grows alongside local partnerships from there.