Safety should not depend on
income, assets, or luck.
We build practical tools for families and caregivers navigating real danger and real bureaucracy — because safety and dignity shouldn't require a lawyer, a savings account, or a lucky break. Cleat & Pintle exists to close that gap with tools built for the real world.
Two tools. One mission: hold the line.
Cleat & Pintle is the parent organization behind Elephant Trace and Kestrel — two tools built for two different fights families face every day. One helps you plan for physical safety risks before they become emergencies. The other helps you push back when the system says no. Different problems, same purpose.
This is for families and caregivers who are already stretched thin — managing a household, a diagnosis, a school district, a caseworker, and a job, often at the same time. It's for people who don't have a spare afternoon to figure out a broken system, let alone the money to hire someone who already has.
Map the neighborhood. See the hazards. Plan before panic.
Elephant Trace helps families and caregivers map their surroundings and identify risks before a crisis happens — built with elopement and wandering risk specifically in mind. It turns a stressful unknown into a plan you can act on, not something you're figuring out mid-emergency. Because the best time to know where the water, the road, and the exits are is before someone goes missing.
Learn about Elephant TraceThe system says no. Kestrel helps you fight back.
Kestrel is built for the moment a school, insurer, or agency denies you something your family needs. It helps you understand the denial, find the leverage points in the process, and respond with the kind of clarity that bureaucracies are built to wear down. No legal jargon, no guesswork — just a practical path from "no" to "let's see about that."
Explore KestrelBecause families are asked to do too much with too little.
A child with a wandering risk doesn't wait for a convenient week. A service denial doesn't pause while you're already fighting for an IEP, appealing a Medicaid decision, or trying to get a straight answer from three different agencies. These pressures compound. They don't take turns.
The systems meant to help are fragmented by design — different agencies, different forms, different rules, none of them talking to each other. The families who navigate them successfully are often the ones with a lawyer on retainer or a relative who worked in the system. Everyone else is left to figure it out alone, usually at 11 p.m., usually exhausted.
Cleat & Pintle exists to hand over some of that fluency and structure — not as a promise to fix everything, but as real tools that do real work: helping you see risk before it becomes a crisis, and helping you push back when a system tries to close a door that should stay open.
Safety
Physical safety planning that meets families before the emergency, not after.
Security
Your information stays yours; nothing here is built to surveil or monetize the people it serves.
Leverage
Practical tools that give families the footing to push back against systems built to say no.
Access
Built for households with limited time and money, not just the ones who can already afford help.
Why the name matters
A cleat holds fast. A pintle makes steering possible. Both are small pieces of marine hardware doing quiet, essential work under load — which is exactly the kind of work we set out to build.
Read our storyStart where you are.
Whether you're a parent, a caregiver, a professional, or a potential partner, this is the place to begin.