About the founder
Built to help neighbors find practical next steps
Rapid Mutual Aid MN is a privacy-first resource hub for West St. Paul, South St. Paul, Inver Grove Heights, Mendota Heights, Eagan, and the wider Dakota County area. TJ Livesay built and maintains it to help families navigate food, housing, health, immigration, and safety resources quickly, without surveillance, unnecessary data collection, or guesswork.
Resources come first. This page provides context on the work.
Where this started
The work grew from urgent local needs that quickly became a systems problem. Neighbors were looking for food support, legal routing, safety information, and practical next steps. Finding current, trustworthy information was slow and scattered. Existing tools were hard to navigate under stress, not designed with privacy in mind, and difficult to maintain.
That gap turned into this site: a maintained, mobile-first, privacy-conscious resource directory with bilingual structure, verified information, and no tracking.
What was built
The work in practice
These are concrete examples of what the site includes and how it was built. Each reflects a design decision: collect less, route faster, protect people under pressure.
Privacy-first technology
Privacy-first workflows and digital hygiene
Designed the site and community processes around minimal data collection: no accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no third-party scripts. Trained community members on digital safety and digital hygiene practices suited to sensitive community work.
Encrypted tools
Signal and Proton onboarding
Guided community members through setting up and using Signal and Proton for encrypted communication. Wrote plain-language onboarding steps that work for people new to these tools.
Food access
Safer proxy shopping process
Worked with local food support partners to help shape a safer proxy shopping process that reduced unnecessary full-name collection at the point of service, making the process safer for the families being helped.
Search visibility
SEO for public resource pages
Structured public resource pages for search visibility so that people looking for local help can find it through a search engine without needing a referral. There was a discovery gap with an outside community tool. Rapid Mutual Aid MN helped more people find it through search.
Public safety tool
Built a page to help people check a rental car license plate before accepting a vehicle. This is a targeted safety step, not a tracking tool, proof system, ownership lookup, or license plate database. It does not identify drivers and does not support following, surrounding, or interfering with anyone.
Detention support
Created a step-by-step guide for families trying to locate someone detained by ICE. The guide uses the ICE detainee locator (ODLS) and EOIR case search. A result that doesn't show someone does not prove they are not detained. The guide explains what to do next in that case.
Operating principles
- Collect less
- Route faster
- Verify before publishing
- Protect families under pressure
- Design for mobile, stress, and translation
- Avoid surveillance, rumor, and intake-database patterns
Community assistance
Need help building something similar?
If you are part of a community group, church, small nonprofit, local organizer network, or volunteer coalition that needs help building safer resource infrastructure, I am available to help.
How to reach out
Use the contact page to get in touch. Describe your community's needs and what you are trying to build. You do not need to have a clear plan yet.
Share only the minimum needed. Do not send names of minors, immigration status, A-numbers, case numbers, home addresses, or private documents by email or through the contact page.
This is not legal advice. For immigration or legal help, see the immigration legal support page.