Most small cities run some version of a neighbor-help program. It may be called Snow Angels, or Senior Chores, or it may have no name at all and live in the head of one person at the senior center. It usually works the same way. A resident calls. Someone writes the request down. Someone else goes through a list of volunteers, makes four phone calls and finds one person who is free on Thursday.
It works because that one staff member makes it work. It also stops working the week they are on vacation.
NeighborLift is that program, built into Bloomz for Cities. It keeps the part that matters, which is city staff approving everyone who takes part, and removes the phone tree and the spreadsheet.
Staff approve both sides first
Nobody takes part until city staff say so. That applies to the neighbors who ask for help and to the volunteers who offer it.
A resident applies as a neighbor, a volunteer, or both. Staff review each application and approve, reject, suspend or reinstate it. By default a volunteer cannot be approved without a background check on file. Bloomz does not run that check. Your city runs or arranges it the way it already does, and staff record the result and, where there is one, its expiry date. When a check expires, that volunteer can no longer claim requests until it is renewed.
Staff can also post a request on behalf of an approved neighbor. Plenty of the residents this program exists for will never open an app, and they should not have to.
Ask, claim, done, confirmed
An approved neighbor posts a request with a category, a short description, a date with a time window or flexible timing, an address, and how many volunteers the job needs, from one to three. The categories are the ordinary ones: yard work, snow, errands, a ride, a small home repair, tech help, a visit or check-in call.
Approved volunteers nearby who offer that kind of help are notified. Each volunteer sets their own radius, from one to 25 miles, with five as the default. What they see at this point is deliberately limited: the job, the time window, the neighbor’s first name and a rough distance.
A volunteer claims the request. Only then do they see the address and phone number. When the job is finished the volunteer marks it done, and the neighbor confirms. If the neighbor forgets, a reminder goes out after 48 hours.
The address stays hidden until someone commits
This is the design decision we would defend first. A list of seniors who live alone, with addresses and the times they expect a visitor, is exactly the list a city should not publish to everyone who signs up.
So the address and phone number are shown only to a volunteer who has been approved by staff and has claimed that specific request. Volunteers who have not claimed the request see no address and no phone number. Matching is by category and distance within each volunteer’s radius. It is not AI, and nothing about a resident’s location is collected from their phone. The location is always an address the resident or staff entered.
Points when the neighbor confirms
When the neighbor confirms the work was done, and your city has Civic Rewards on, the volunteer earns points that residents redeem for offers at local businesses. The default is 25 points per task and the city sets the amount.
Points are paid on the neighbor’s confirmation, not on the volunteer’s say-so. There are daily limits as well: three awards per volunteer and five per confirming neighbor. A rewards program that can be farmed stops meaning anything, so the limits are part of the design.
When something goes wrong
Sometimes a volunteer does not show up, or a neighbor says the job was not finished. Either side can report a concern. If a neighbor reports the work as not done, the request goes to staff, who can confirm it, reopen it for another volunteer or cancel it. A city that wants a closer hand on the program can also turn on review, so every request is checked by staff before volunteers see it.
Every step is recorded on the request, so the answer to “what happened with that gutter job” is in one place and does not depend on anyone’s memory.
What version 1 does not do
NeighborLift is a version 1 release, and it is worth being plain about its edges:
- There is no in-app messaging between neighbor and volunteer. They use the phone number shown after the claim.
- There is no separate coordinator role yet. Staff with a city admin role run the program.
- There are no recurring requests and no impact report with a CSV export.
Those are planned for version 2. They are not live today.
NeighborLift is also off by default. Bloomz switches it on for a city and sets up the staff roles with you, and it runs inside the same app your residents already use for alerts and reports, so there is nothing new to download. Residents sign in to take part.
If you run a program like this today
The useful question is not whether your volunteers would use an app. It is what happens to the program when the person who runs it is out for two weeks. If the answer is “it pauses,” the program lives in a person, and that is the problem NeighborLift is built to solve.
See how it works on the NeighborLift page, how points are redeemed in Civic Rewards, and what else has shipped for cities in What’s New.