In Time of Need



In Time of Need is an Oregon public service corporation formed in early 2024, dedicated to serving 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, along with Google's data warehouse of geographic direction and institutional details.

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, immediately available to anyone in need.

As of October 2025, the current status is...
  1. 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.)

    In August we submitted a proposal for a senior year capstone course project to the OSU Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to have students develop artificial intelligence agents that will scrape websites for all available provider information and place it in a format for upload to our provider database. This will eliminate untold hours of human labor, and can be scheduled for regular scan and update. On August 18, 2025 our proposal was accepted and approved by OSU's EE/CS Department.

    Next step: using the AI crawler, extract provider information from as many of the 208 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 AI agents. Ideally, in emergencies our AI engine will continually update shelter information.

    Concurrently we want to 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).

  2. Content:   Currently our provider database contains location and contact information, hours of operation and other details of all 620 food pantries and hot and boxed meals sources in 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

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...