In Time of Need
In Time of Need is an Oregon public service corporation (i.e., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) formed in early 2024, dedicated to providing helpful information to anyone in their time of need.
We are creating a service on top of a product:
Our service is providing immediate, helpful information to anyone in need, or who just wants to improve their station in life.
Our product is an application that queries our large database of provider contact information, coordinated with Google's data warehouse of geographic direction and institutional details.
In addition, we are compiling a large library of links to an abundance of helpful information.
This sketch illustrates the scope and explains the philosophy of the project.
Our grand objective is to cover the lower levels of
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (food, shelter, clothing, etc.) in all fifty states and the country's territories,
making information about who's providing what goods and services, where to go to receive them, and how best to get there, and make the information immediately available to anyone in need.
As of November 2025, the current status is...
- Technical: We plan to have a fully working prototype early next year, asking people with real needs
to test it for effectiveness and ease of use.
The application's query engine, including its content management system (CMS), works exceptionally well. (This schema
portrays our user interface/experience approach and also how we will use data analytics to feed back information to providers and foundations.)
We are joined in this effort by five students in the capstone project course in the OSU Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
This team will develop artificial intelligence agents that will scan provider websites for all pertinent information and convert it to a normalized format for upload to our provider
database. This will eliminate untold hours of human labor, and can be scheduled for regular scan and update.
Next step: using the AI agents, we will extract provider information from as many of the 208 national food banks, starting with the Oregon Food Bank's 610 pantries and other sources of free food, in the United States as we can. Similarly, develop a strategy for obtaining provider information
about all the homeless shelters, emergency shelters and domestic violence shelters in the country using similar agents.
Ideally, in emergencies our AI engine will continually update shelter information.
Concurrently, we will complete the design of a friendly, satisfying user experience (UX) and easily navigable user interface (UI) for the front end of the application (possibly incorporating
artificial intelligence).
- Data Content: Currently our test database contains provider location and contact information, hours of operation
and other details of all 620 food pantries and sources of hot and boxed meals throughout the state of Oregon. The manual input of this data took over 190 hours; and when the input was complete
much of the data was already obsolete and needed to be re-input. This is a strong argument for AI automation.
- Staffing: We'll need people—volunteers for now but eventually employees and contractors—to refine the app's code and
to populate and maintain the service provider database and the Well-being Library.
- Legal: In Time of Need is an Oregon public benefit corporation
[2209845-95] with a federal EIN
[99-0535831].
For the record, here are our Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws,
and once again the 501(c)(3) qualification letter from the IRS. We will employ attorneys to build
protections of our intellectual property and to safeguard us from liability from false or inaccurate Provider information.
- Financial: We're covering all fees and other expenses out-of-pocket for now. We're working up a presentation that will tell our
story to stakeholders and potential funders. Since we are a 501(c)(3), all donations will be tax-deductible. Our draft Business Plan is
available online.
Our product is an application that queries our large database of provider contact information, coordinated with Google's data warehouse of geographic direction and institutional details. In addition, we are compiling a large library of links to an abundance of helpful information.
The application's query engine, including its content management system (CMS), works exceptionally well. (This schema
portrays our user interface/experience approach and also how we will use data analytics to feed back information to providers and foundations.)
We are joined in this effort by five students in the capstone project course in the OSU Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This team will develop artificial intelligence agents that will scan provider websites for all pertinent information and convert it to a normalized format for upload to our provider database. This will eliminate untold hours of human labor, and can be scheduled for regular scan and update.
Next step: using the AI agents, we will extract provider information from as many of the 208 national food banks, starting with the Oregon Food Bank's 610 pantries and other sources of free food, in the United States as we can. Similarly, develop a strategy for obtaining provider information about all the homeless shelters, emergency shelters and domestic violence shelters in the country using similar agents. Ideally, in emergencies our AI engine will continually update shelter information.
Concurrently, we will complete the design of a friendly, satisfying user experience (UX) and easily navigable user interface (UI) for the front end of the application (possibly incorporating artificial intelligence).
We are joined in this effort by five students in the capstone project course in the OSU Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This team will develop artificial intelligence agents that will scan provider websites for all pertinent information and convert it to a normalized format for upload to our provider database. This will eliminate untold hours of human labor, and can be scheduled for regular scan and update.
Next step: using the AI agents, we will extract provider information from as many of the 208 national food banks, starting with the Oregon Food Bank's 610 pantries and other sources of free food, in the United States as we can. Similarly, develop a strategy for obtaining provider information about all the homeless shelters, emergency shelters and domestic violence shelters in the country using similar agents. Ideally, in emergencies our AI engine will continually update shelter information.
Concurrently, we will complete the design of a friendly, satisfying user experience (UX) and easily navigable user interface (UI) for the front end of the application (possibly incorporating artificial intelligence).
The original HTML version of the application we called The Path, a proof-of-concept that is temporarily located on Dick's personal website, has two principal resources...
- The Services Directory—a long list of organizations, mostly in the greater Portland area.
- The Well-being Library—a place to explore ways to manage both challenges and opportunities.