We Enhance Collaboration Between Area Social Services — Helping People in Crisis More Intuitively Connect to Resources. Our Gateway is Unique In Several Ways:

1) We provide a community document server. This allows documents to be uploaded that are believed to be helpful to service connection, e.g., intake paperwork for various agencies, application forms, bus schedules, and any other helpful forms and documents. This makes it easier for case workers to cross refer clients to other providers for additional services when needed –when application forms for services all across the county are located in one searchable directory.

This saves community service providers bandwidth and the hassle of maintaining upload security on their own sites, and saves small charities from having to have their own IT department. Since its all in one place it also helps people in the community more easily find the forms they need for quicker service connection. All uploads are reviewed by our quality assurance staff to insure compliance with community standards.

2) Locally responsive to community input. We enable anyone to submit resource information and/or suggested edits at anytime. Our staff partner with local leadership in monitoring this input for quality assurance. This enables the information served to be more responsive to people with actual boots on the ground, capturing their knowledge-base of real time changes in the eligibility requirements, protocols, and availability of services across multiple resource domains.

3) We amplify local social service news and facilitate community conversation. We provide devoted resource forums and a local social service news channel for each community. Each forum is staffed by local social workers to help answer resource questions and build community. Social service news –from any local service provider you’d like included– is aggregated and rebroadcast on a single channel, making it easier for the community to follow local social service updates. This news is additionally rebroadcast as an Apple Podcast which can be played from Alexa or your favorite podcast player.

4) Our gateway is mobile and multilingual. Our document server is operational on desktops and mobile devices, and can be viewed in multiple languages, specifically selected to match the demographics of any locality. Together this increases the scope of who, when, and where access to social service resource information can be gained, significantly increasing accessibility to all in need.

5) We protect privacy. Supplementing the public document server, we additionally provide a private document server when needed. Every page on our platform uses HTTPS protocol, and we continually optimize our encryption to reasonably assure communities that they can view local resource information with the highest level of privacy and anonymity. Our privacy policy actually protects privacy, and we are HIPAA compliant partners — fully participating in the protection of privacy rights defined in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

6) We bridge secular and faith-based community resources. Our document server merges secular and faith-based community resource information. For instance, a soup kitchen is included whether it operates out of the basement of a local church or the civic building. This provides not only greater possibilities for interagency communication and collaboration, but greater depth of support for people in crisis.

7) We enhance the collaborative culture among resource providers in your community. We provide free trainings on best practices of social service information sharing for local social service agencies, and free community trainings on how to use the technology we provide. We additionally meet with local leadership to build a quality assurance team that is 100% collaboratively led by stakeholders from multiple agencies in the county — providing local oversight of all content.

You can view a list of the communities we currently serve at: localresources.info