Where We Are Today

Building the Foundation, Testing the Vision, and Growing With Our Community

Over the past few months, Community Rolodex has quietly grown from an idea and a handful of conversations into the early foundation of a much larger community project. It started with a simple question: What if finding community resources felt more like receiving a recommendation from someone you trust and less like trying to navigate an overwhelming search on your own?

That question started conversations. Providers shared other providers, community members suggested organizations, and people made introductions, shared experiences, and pointed toward resources that might otherwise have been difficult to find. One connection led to another, and the working Community Rolodex database gradually grew to include more than 300 potential community resources across 12 categories.

That number needs context. These are not 300 fully vetted or actively recommended resources. They represent a growing starting point. Information still needs to be reviewed, organized, updated, verified where possible, and strengthened through professional, community, and lived-experience perspectives. Community Rolodex is still very much being built.

Why We Are Taking Our Time

Collecting hundreds of names is relatively easy. Turning that information into something people can actually trust and navigate is much harder. A massive list is not the goal, especially when the person searching may already feel overwhelmed.

Someone looking for help should not have to sort through hundreds of organizations, open dozens of websites, make call after call, and try to determine which information is current or where to begin. The challenge now is figuring out how to take a large amount of community information and make it simpler, clearer, more current, and easier to access without losing the valuable details behind it.

That requires time, testing, relationships, and better systems.

Building More Than a Directory

The long-term vision for Community Rolodex goes beyond creating a static directory. We are developing ideas and systems that could eventually provide more real-time snapshots of the community and a better understanding of how resources are actually working for the people using them.

Future surveys and ongoing feedback could bring together perspectives from community members, providers, professionals, families, and people with lived experience. This could help us better understand whether information is still accurate, where people are successfully connecting with services, where navigation breaks down, what needs are changing, and where gaps may exist.

The goal is not to allow one person's experience to determine whether a resource, provider, organization, or business is "good" or "bad." Experiences can vary greatly, and no feedback system can be perfectly objective. Instead, Community Rolodex hopes to develop ways of gathering multiple perspectives as fairly, transparently, and without bias as reasonably possible.

Over time, this could create something closer to a living picture of community resources rather than a list that becomes outdated shortly after it is published. It is an ambitious goal, and it will require significant development and testing, but every larger system has to begin somewhere.

The Website Is the Front Door

The website currently being developed is intended to become the front door to Community Rolodex, not the entire system. It provides a place to explain the vision, introduce the 12 community categories, invite participation, gather information, share updates, and eventually make appropriate resource information easier to access.

Behind that simpler experience, much more work is happening. Community Rolodex is exploring Salesforce as a possible future platform for managing the larger database, community relationships, verification, updates, feedback, and other information that could eventually support the project.

The goal is for the complexity to live behind the scenes so that the experience for someone looking for help can eventually become simpler.

A Lot Has Been Happening Quietly

The earliest weeks of Community Rolodex involved significant outreach, conversations, resource sharing, and introductions, and some incredible connections came from that period. Over the past several weeks, the project has been quieter publicly, but the work has continued behind the scenes.

That time has been spent organizing the growing database, developing forms, building the website, thinking through verification, exploring Salesforce, researching potential funding opportunities, considering how ongoing community feedback could be collected responsibly, and developing systems that can eventually be tested.

This quieter stage has also created space to think more carefully about what Community Rolodex should and should not become. Rather than rushing to publish everything that has been collected, the focus is on creating a stronger foundation and preparing to test it.

Preparing to Test Again

As these systems become more developed, Community Rolodex plans to return to more active pilot testing. Providers, professionals, community organizations, families, individuals, and people with lived experience will be important in helping us understand what works, what does not, what feels overwhelming, and what may still be missing.

Some of the connections already made have created opportunities to learn from people with expertise and experience far beyond what any one person could bring to the project. Those relationships are helping shape the next stage, and the process will continue to be one of testing, listening, adjusting, and testing again.

We Still Need Your Help

You do not have to wait until Community Rolodex is finished to participate. In fact, this may be one of the most valuable stages to get involved because so much is still being shaped.

If you are a community member, provider, professional, nonprofit, business, parent, peer, organization, or someone with lived experience, you can help by filling out our forms, suggesting resources, sharing information about your organization, identifying gaps, offering feedback, or expressing interest in future pilot testing.

You can also help by sharing Community Rolodex with someone doing meaningful work, introducing us to a provider or organization we should know, or connecting us with someone who understands one of our 12 resource areas. Some of the most valuable progress so far has happened simply because one person thought, "You should talk to this person."

Where We Really Are Today

Community Rolodex is not yet a finished or fully active community resource platform, and we do not want to present it as one. We currently have a growing foundation of more than 300 potential resources, early community relationships, a developing website, and plans for stronger systems that can eventually support verification, feedback, and more current views of what is happening in the community.

We are exploring Salesforce, researching funding opportunities, developing approaches to verification and ongoing surveys, and preparing for another stage of pilot testing. There is still a great deal of work ahead. Resources need to be vetted, information will change, systems need to be tested, feedback will sometimes conflict, mistakes will be found, and new questions will emerge. That is part of building something responsibly.

Community Rolodex does not need to pretend to be finished in order to begin creating something valuable. It needs a strong starting point, people willing to participate, systems that can improve over time, and a commitment to keep listening.

That is where we are today: still building, connecting, learning, and growing, one connection, one conversation, and one partnership at a time.