Building Kind Communities Together

We are dedicated to building kind communities for the benefit of all people. Through meetings, dinners, conferences, and family events, we create spaces for people to meet and connect with a shared intention of making more kindness in the world.

Community-Led Groups

We offer community-led groups for people to build kind communities, and also for specific populations enduring ongoing harm to build practical resources and systems of support together. We offer regularly scheduled meeting times that take place in person and online, and the spaces and collaboration tools that support them.

Meetings are community-led by the participants. Participants maintain and update the group’s community guidelines and relational agreements in shared documents as needed. Group guidelines and agreements function to help meet the special needs of people enduring ongoing harm, and protect people’s rights, anonymity, privacy, and disability, so people can safely build the infrastructure that makes help possible.

Connection Between Meetings

Each community maintains a private messaging platform and a dedicated video meeting space available 24/7. The group’s video meeting link is pinned to the top of the messaging platform chat so members can access it anytime to identify needs, exchange kind help, and offer support to one another in everyday life.

This infrastructure creates opportunities for connection for people who are geographically isolated, disabled, or facing other barriers to building more kind community in person.

Privacy Across Groups

Community toolkit workshops, coalition and professional consultation meetings, Kind Meetings, community dinners, family events, and quarterly conferences, are open to all of our members. Members’ participation in specific groups, such as those for complex trauma or extreme experiences, remains private in mixed community meetings. Members choose what they share about themselves and how they participate in larger community meetings.

Kind Help Exchange

Kind Help Exchange is a community exchange where people can ask for help, offer help, and respond to one another's needs. There are three ways community members may participate:

Ask for help: Make a request when there is something you could use help with.
Respond to a request: Let someone know when you think you may be able to help.
Offer help: Share something you are generally available to contribute. For example: “I enjoy cooking and am sometimes available to make an extra meal for someone!”

Someone might need a ride, help moving furniture, someone to walk their dog, or company while doing a hard task. Someone else might have time, knowledge, skills, resources, or practical help they would be glad to contribute. Kind Help Exchange provides community infrastructure that connects people’s needs with the kind help others are available to offer.

This community infrastructure is different from a time bank. Kind help is freely contributed, not earned or owed. There are no credits, hours or balances, to keep. There is no expectation of reciprocity between people. Receiving help does not create a debt and contributing help does not create a claim on future help.

The exchange works because community members contribute when they have capacity and request support when they need it. You do not have to contribute help before you can ask for it.

How to Join

We offer an orientation for new people referred to our meetings. We screen newcomers for safety concerns and conflicts of interest. During orientation, we review our organizational policies, community guidelines, and relational agreements, ask what people hope to find in community, and consider together whether our meetings are a good fit.

Our Charitable Mission

Help Exists is a tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code that stewards emergency hardship funds for a charitable class of people living in active abuse conditions who depend on their abusers for survival.

Finances should never be a barrier to kindness or community. All of our meetings are free, and admission to our ticketed events is pay-what-you-can, with no explanation of financial hardship required.

Kind communities with functional relationships, resources, and capacity make paths to freedom. Our administration, organizing, and fundraising all serve this purpose.

We are community-led with no religious affiliation or political affiliation. We are just people who share an intention of kindness.

Understanding Kindness

Kindness

By kindness, we mean: noticing when someone (including ourselves) has a need that isn't being met, and responding with care, curiosity, and respect.

Dignity

Dignity acknowledges living beings as existing and recognizes every person has their own experiences, needs, and interests. Dignity is inherent––it exists whether or not others recognize it, and it cannot be earned or lost. We learn about our own dignity by being treated with dignity.

Respect

Respect is how the recognition of dignity is acted upon. It is the expression of dignity through behavior that acknowledges and protects the boundaries, needs, and interests of living beings. We learn respect by having our own boundaries recognized.

Rights

Rights are the conditions that must be protected if dignity is to be respected. Some rights concern our relationship with ourselves. These are inner rights. Other rights concern how we relate with others. These are social rights. Our rights still exist, even when they are being violated. Our rights exist whether we are consciously aware of them, or not.

When rights are not fully protected because of conditions that constrain autonomy––our rights then function to orient us toward what needs protection.

Building Blocks of Kind Communities

Kind behavior

Kindness happens when a person wants to see another person’s unmet need, and takes action to understand it or meet it. Without transaction, without cost, but just for the sake of being kind.

Kind formats

Without the protection of a kind environment, kindness between individuals is not enough! Relationships and social environments require infrastructure that actively cultivates kindness.

We intentionally create formats for building relationships and social environments that foster our ability to connect in ways that are mutually protected and secure, and that value the agency of each person while building functional community.

Kind culture

Rather than depending on a few exceptionally kind individuals, we ask: How do we build communities where kindness is the norm? How do people learn kindness if it was never modeled for them? How do people practice kindness when they do not yet feel safe enough to do so? Kind communities are the social conditions that make rights increasingly practicable. Our efforts here are creating culture where kindness is supported, dependable, and transformative.

Kindness can be built into the fabric of our relationships, communities, and systems. We are working to create the conditions under which kindness becomes reliable, and where the dignity, agency, needs, interests, and boundaries of every person are consistently protected.

Kindness is Functional

What becomes possible with kindness?

When someone in the community is sick, other community members could send good wishes. Or, in a functional community, community members can arrange the help for driving them to urgent care, sitting with them at the appointment, picking up their medication, or making them a meal.

When a family welcomes a new baby, faces an illness or job loss, or takes on new caregiving responsibilities, the whole household may need support. Functional communities can help arrange meal trains, childcare, or help navigating resources.

What are functional communities?

Functional communities can accommodate all of these possibilities, and create opportunities that none of us could create alone––where individuals, households, and families can enjoy activities together, and share support through hard times.

Functional community enriches the lives of all people and people give and receive in different ways over time. The purpose of our activities is to help people build more functional and kind communities together.