A county needed a simple way for residents to ask for help.
We designed, built, and launched the Community Care Portal for Jackson County Job and Family Services: one place for residents to ask for help, and one place for staff to work every request.
Visit jacksoncountycare.org
The need
Adult Protective Services covers all of Jackson County with a very small staff. Residents aged 60 and older need help with ordinary things: groceries, a ride to a medical appointment, a utility bill, a loose porch step. Those requests arrived by phone, by walk-in, and by word of mouth, and staff carried the whole queue by hand. Who had asked, what they needed, which church or service club had already been called, what was still open: it lived in notebooks, inboxes, and memory. Nothing showed the backlog in one place, so keeping up meant re-tracing it every time, and connecting a resident to the right volunteer depended on someone remembering the right name.
The county issued an RFQ for a portal that would take requests online and give staff one place to work them.
Why us
We answered with working software. The proposal linked to a running prototype the county could open and click through, which turned the evaluation from a document review into a product demo. The rest of the fit was less visible: this is a service delivery problem before it is a web problem, and we have spent years inside government building the tools that carry programs like this one.
What we built
The public side is written short and plain, at an accessible reading level, and built to work on an old phone.
- Residents ask for help in about two minutes, with no account, and get a reference number they can use to check on it later.
- Staff sign in to one dashboard: every request with its status, history, and notes, next to a searchable directory to match it against.
- A public Community Board posts needs without names, so volunteers and local organizations can offer to help. Nothing appears there unless the resident asked for it and a staff member published it.
- Local organizations add themselves to the directory through a form staff review before anything goes live.
- Resident names and contact details are private by default, enforced at the database rather than hidden in the interface.
Who owns it
The portal is live, and it is Jackson County's. The domain, the database, the hosting, the backup storage, and the uptime monitoring were each set up in the county's name to transfer, so the county holds the asset rather than renting access to ours. Backups run daily, encrypted, into county-owned storage. Staff run the portal day to day and we stay on for hosting and maintenance: updates, monitoring, and the small changes that surface once real residents are using it.
That is a choice, not a lock. A technical reference, a maintenance runbook, and a restore guide ship with the code, and every schema change is versioned in the repository. If the county ever wants to bring the portal in house or move it to another vendor, what they need to do it is already written down.