Hylo works for groups that need to do more than talk.

You want to connect people who share a place: a neighborhood, a town, a watershed. The challenge isn’t distance; it’s that people who live near each other often have no way to coordinate, share resources, or make decisions about the things they share. Existing tools are either social media (designed for attention, not action) or government portals (designed for broadcast, not participation).

Hylo organizes groups around geography. The map shows what’s happening near you. Requests and offers connect neighbors. Events bring people together in person. As trust builds, groups can move into collective decision-making — proposals about shared resources, participatory budgets, community agreements. Subgroups let neighborhoods coordinate within a city, blocks within a neighborhood.

When disaster hits, the communities that respond fastest are the ones that already know each other. But most neighborhoods have no pre-existing coordination infrastructure. Emergency management agencies can broadcast, but they can’t facilitate neighbor-to-neighbor support at scale. After the initial crisis, long-term recovery requires sustained coordination that emergency systems aren’t designed for.

Hylo gives communities the coordination infrastructure before they need it — and the same tools work during and after a crisis. Place-based groups connect neighbors. Requests and offers match needs to resources in real time, geographically. The map shows where help is needed and where it’s available. Cross-group posting lets mutual aid networks coordinate with official response agencies. Events organize work parties, supply distributions, check-in meetings. And because the infrastructure was built during calm times, trust is already in place when the storm hits.

Your organization has staff, volunteers, board members, partners, and community members — all in different apps. Internal communication happens on Slack. Community engagement happens on Facebook. Events go through Eventbrite. Board decisions happen in email. Nobody can see the whole picture. And the platforms you’re using are either designed for companies (Slack) or designed to monetize your community’s attention (Facebook).

One platform for all of it: internal team coordination, community engagement, events, volunteer coordination, proposals and decisions, and cross-organization partnerships. Nested groups mean your board, your staff, your volunteer corps, and your public community all have their own spaces while staying connected. No ads, no data extraction, and open-source governance mean your organization’s home won’t be rug-pulled by a platform’s quarterly earnings call.

You run a program — a cohort, a fellowship, a course, a professional development track — and the learning experience lives in a dozen places. Content in an LMS. Discussion on Slack. Events on Luma. Assignments in Google Docs. Alumni scattered to the wind. There’s no persistent community that holds the learning, the relationships, and the ongoing connection after the program ends.

Learning tracks guide members through structured content with actions and completion tracking. Discussion posts create space for reflection and peer exchange. The community persists after the program ends — alumni stay connected, share resources, and continue learning together. Groups can nest program cohorts within a broader community. Badges earned through track completion signal expertise and unlock access. Paid tracks enable financially sustainable programming.

You run events — conferences, retreats, summits, festivals — and the community energy dissipates immediately after. Attendees connect intensely for three days and then scatter back to their inboxes. You want the relationships and momentum to persist, but a post-event Slack goes silent within a week. The next gathering starts from scratch.

Create a group for your event community that lives year-round — not just during the gathering. Between events, members discuss, share resources, collaborate on projects, and stay connected. When the next event approaches, the community is already warm. Cross-group posting lets you share across related event communities. The map helps attendees find each other geographically for local meetups between main events.

Cooperatives need democratic governance baked into daily operations, not bolted on as an annual meeting. Member-owners need to participate in decisions, understand what’s happening, and hold leadership accountable — but the tools designed for top-down companies don’t support distributed authority. And most co-ops are too small to build custom tools.

Hylo’s governance tools were designed for exactly this: proposals with consent-based voting, roles with clearly scoped authority, agreements that bind, and moderation that’s accountable to the community. Working groups and committees each get their own subgroup. Cross-group posting keeps the whole membership informed without drowning them. The developmental progression — from conversation to mutual support to collective governance — mirrors how healthy cooperatives grow.