How one mutual aid group grew from a group chat to a nonprofit

It started as a twelve-person group chat during the first weeks of a citywide shutdown, organized to check in on elderly neighbors who couldn't easily get to the grocery store. Three years later, that same effort operates as a registered nonprofit with a small paid staff, a weekly food distribution program, and a waitlist of volunteers.

"We had no plan to become an organization," said co-founder Jenny Dao. "We just kept saying yes to the next request, and eventually the next request was 'you should probably get insurance for this.'" That incremental growth — accepting one more responsibility at a time rather than launching with a five-year plan — is something Dao now credits for the group's stability, even as it made the eventual transition to nonprofit status more complicated than starting one from scratch would have been.

Not everything scaled cleanly. The founders note that some of what made the original group chat effective — the speed of a dozen people coordinating informally, no forms, no waiting — became harder to preserve once the organization needed to track outcomes for funders and maintain consistent records for liability reasons. Several early volunteers drifted away during that transition, uncomfortable with the shift from informal favor-trading to something that looked more like an institution.

Still, the core function has held: food and translation help reaching people who might otherwise fall through the cracks between larger, better-funded social services. "We're not trying to replace what the county does," Dao said. "We're just faster, and we pick up the phone. That's still the whole model."