Case study
Living Links
A referral toolkit for frontline community workers. It answers the question a directory never answers, which is not where to send someone but how to get them through the door.
The problem
Someone sits across from a person who needs help with housing, food, income, mental health or documents. The worker usually knows roughly where to send them. What they do not know is how. What are the intake hours. Is a referral from a professional required. Will this person be turned away without photo ID. Is there a wait list. Can they get there without a car.
Existing directories answer where. They do not answer how. A phone number handed to someone in crisis is not a referral, it is a dead end with a polite tone. That gap is the entire project.
It is built for a phone, used in the middle of a conversation, often on bad rural signal, by someone who has about thirty seconds before the moment passes.
What it does
It is a directory, but the useful part is everything a directory usually leaves out.
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It answers how, not just where
Every listing says what actually happens when someone walks in. Opening hours, whether a professional has to make the referral, what documents are needed, whether there is a wait, and how to get there. A worker can read it out loud while the person is still sitting in front of them.
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It protects the people it is about
What somebody searches for stays on their phone and is never sent anywhere or counted. Services whose location has to stay secret, like shelters, cannot have an address stored against them at all. That was the first thing decided and everything else was built around it.
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Nothing goes in unless someone confirmed it
A wrong phone number for a shelter is worse than an empty page, because someone in a bad moment dials it and reaches silence. So every listing records who confirmed it and when, and the categories nobody has filled in yet are shown as empty rather than quietly padded out.
How it is being built
Not from a specification. From conversations with the people who do this work every day, who described what goes wrong and what they actually need in the room. My job was to turn that into something that holds up when there is a real person waiting.
It is still going. They test it, they tell me what is missing, and most of the time the change is in their hands within a day or two. That loop is the best part of the project and the reason it is any good.
Built with
Status
Living Links has been a working prototype since Aug 2026, and the partner team at a community nonprofit in Nova Scotia is testing it now. When it is ready, it will be theirs to launch.
I have kept the organization, the people and the place out of this page on purpose. The work is real and still in progress, and the people involved did not sign up to appear in a portfolio. Happy to talk through the technical detail directly.