NeighborNET

NeighborNET is a mobile app for location-based resource sharing, designed to build community resilience before and after disasters. It was Brilliant By Nature's first product, inspired by the isolation people experienced during the pandemic as well as the need for communities to come together during natural and human-made disasters.

The first thing a disaster takes is time. Not water, not power, but the hours between something happening and official help arriving. Local and federal response isn't built for that window, and it isn't reliable at that scale.

The people best positioned to close the gap are already standing next to you. The problem is that most people don't know their neighbors well enough to ask, and have no idea who on their block has a generator, medical training, a truck, or a spare room.

NeighborNET was built to be that missing thread. A need starts at the epicenter and widens on its own: your block first, then nearby blocks, then a several-mile radius, then the city, with how far and how fast depending on what happened and how bad it is. Local and federal agencies connect from the other direction, so help can come down while requests move up, and nonprofits sit in between.

Coordination matters as much as supply. After the Australian bushfires, people were sewing pouches for orphaned kangaroos with no way to know how many were actually needed or how many had already been sent. There was no shortage of goodwill, only of any way to see what everyone else was doing.

Proximity doesn't create trust. A neighbor offering to move debris and a neighbor offering to drive you to a hospital are different asks, and no single verification scheme covers both. Who does the verifying is its own question: the platform, or neighbors vouching for each other, or something else again.

I never believed one answer would work. It needed layers, scaled to how personal or invasive the service was. The most promising direction was teams, small self-forming groups in an immediate area that could connect outward to other groups, building reach the way the network was meant to grow anyway.

The other half is that the app has to be there before anything happens. Local meetups, prep meetings, nonprofit drives, all of it doing double duty as distribution and as the thing that makes neighbors known to each other in the first place.

Individuals and nonprofits get separate onboarding because they enter the network differently. A person joins a block. A 501(c) organization sits between the neighbors and the agencies, so it needs different information and a different kind of standing.

Resource search had to answer more than "who has this nearby". Knowing a food bank exists doesn't tell you whether it still has anything, which is why search surfaces quantity alongside location. That was the kangaroo-pouch problem in a different form.

A basic prototype I built early on to walk users through the critical information an individual account needs at sign-up. I made a matching one for the 501(c) flow.

While the people we interviewed all loved the idea behind NeighborNET, unfortunately it's currently a shelved concept at the moment due to not being able to secure funding. Turns out it's difficult to get investors excited about a product that prioritizes users over profit. With that said, after my experiences developing software with LLMs, mainly Claude Code, it is not out of the realm of possibility that a version of NeighborNET could get another chance at being developed.