You already know who needs what. Reaching the money is the broken part.
You know who on your block is behind on rent, whose power is about to be cut, which family stopped answering the door. That is the hard part, and it is the part that cannot be systematized.
What is missing is a way to reach the funds that would cover it without already knowing somebody who knows somebody. So the money sits in one place and the knowledge sits in another.
Relay exists to remove the introduction, and to do nothing else.
Relay decides nothing about your work.
Worth stating before anything else, because a tool arriving in this space should be judged against the worry that foundation structure and its rules blunt the work. That worry is reasonable, and this is the answer to it.
It does not choose who you help
Every decision about who gets what stays with your group. Relay has no eligibility rules, no scoring, and no view into your distributions.
It does not touch the money
Funds move directly between the fund and your group. Nothing passes through Relay, and Relay takes no cut.
It does not ask about the people you help
No names, no receipts, no case notes, no narratives. There is nowhere in Relay to put that information, which is the point.
It does not report on you
A fund sees what it funded and when. It does not see who you served, or anything you did not send it.
Four steps, and none of them is paperwork.
A group name, which can be a pseudonym. The area you serve. The kinds of aid you work on, such as rent, food or utilities. One contact address, and a shared team address is what groups are asked for rather than any one person’s. Nothing else.
One of three light paths: a fund approves you, another group already on Relay vouches for you, or an established organization refers you. No IDs, no membership lists, and no documents at any point.
An amount, a category, and the region served. A written justification is optional, and the form warns you against putting personal details in it.
Submitted, approved, funds sent, acknowledged. Four states. No receipts, no narratives, and nothing about anyone who received help.
People can also reach you without saying who they are.
Someone in your area can send a request for help that is locked on their own device before it is sent. Only groups working in that area are given a key to open it, and Relay stores it without being able to read it. You open it, see how to reach them, and contact them directly, outside Relay. They are given a short safe word, and saying it back is how they know your call is genuine and not from someone pretending.
Open code, and nothing to take private.
Relay is AGPL-3.0. In plain terms that means the code cannot be made private by anyone, including whoever ends up owning it, and anyone can inspect it or run their own copy. Every claim on this page can be checked against the code rather than taken on trust.
Nobody has used this yet.
The software is built and running, and no group has joined. The live database holds zero records. A group cannot appear in the public list until a fund hub approves it, so the first fund to take part is what makes both the list and the anonymous requests work at all. Saying so plainly is deliberate: a project asking to be trusted with other people's safety does not get to overstate itself.
Paused, then restarted
Work stopped in February 2026 after the last planned stage shipped, and started again in August 2026 to repair the deployment and clear the known problems.
One person built it
Everything described on these pages was written by one contributor. The engineering is the part that is finished. Nothing else is.
No money is being asked for
Mythic Works LLC is building Relay and intends to hand it to a nonprofit, which is not formed yet. There is no donation button and no fundraising.