Why this exists
Most of us grew up trusting that when things went wrong, help would show up. A number to call, an agency, a system built to catch you.
That trust isn’t universal, and for a lot of people it’s been thinning for a while. Not through any single dramatic event, just the slow experience of asking for help and finding the line busy, the office closed, the wait too long.
Heavens to Betsy starts from an older idea. Long before there were systems to call, there were neighbors. People who had what you needed, and people who needed what you had. That didn’t stop being true. We just stopped practicing it.
This site is a small, practical piece of practicing it again. Post what you have, find what you need, and do it directly. Person to person, no institution required in between.
If you found us through Xennonites
If you’ve been reading Relay or talking on Connect, you already know the thinking behind this. Xennonites is where we read and talk about the world as it actually is. Heavens to Betsy is where that turns into something you can do. An offer posted, a need met, one household at a time.
If you landed here first, welcome. You don’t need the rest of it to use this site. If you want the fuller thinking behind why this exists, that’s where to find it.
Who’s behind this
Brad has spent the better part of three decades building infrastructure. The unglamorous, load-bearing kind most people never think about until it fails. That work taught a simple lesson. Systems that hold up under pressure are built with intention, tested before they’re needed, and maintained by people who actually understand them. Systems that look fine until the day they don’t are usually the ones nobody built with care.
That lesson didn’t stay confined to servers. Reading Christopher Alexander’s work on how living, human-scaled patterns get built, and how they quietly die when replaced by things that only look like they work, was the point where infrastructure and community stopped feeling like separate problems. A mutual-aid directory is its own kind of infrastructure. It works the same way anything else does. Built with intention, tested by real use, maintained by people who give a damn.
Heavens to Betsy is that idea applied outward.
Get started
Browse what’s being offered near you, or post what you have.