The part that costs money
How we verify.
Anyone can publish a list. The expensive part is checking it, and then checking it again ninety days later.
Three things travel with every row
No organisation, service or phone number exists in our database without all three of these. It is a constraint in the schema, not a habit:
- A real source. A specific document or endpoint we can go back to, not "the internet".
- A named verifier. Who checked. Never the word "system", because a system does not have a reputation to lose.
- A date. When they checked. This is the one that travels all the way to the page you read.
Nothing here is generated
Agency names, phone numbers, addresses and service descriptions are read from official sources and stored. They are not written by a language model and they are not inferred from patterns in other data.
This matters more here than almost anywhere. A plausible looking phone number that nobody answers, handed to a family during the worst week of their year, is the single worst thing this site could produce. An empty section is recoverable. That is not.
Which sources we trust, and in what order
Every source carries an authority level, and it affects ranking:
- Federal government
- State government
- County and city government
- Area Agencies on Aging
- Insurers and health plans
- Established nonprofits
- Local organisations
- Commercial sources
Aggregators and scraped directories are used to find out that something might exist. They are never the proof that it does.
Ninety days, and why it is shorter than the other half
Availability information expires after ninety days. Entitlement rules get a hundred and eighty.
The difference is not arbitrary. Statutes change on a schedule and get announced. Local services change quietly: a funding cycle ends, a coordinator leaves, a programme stops taking new people, an office moves. None of that is published anywhere. A listing confirmed three months ago is genuinely a listing we are no longer sure about, and pretending otherwise would be asserting something we cannot know.
Past ninety days a listing does not vanish and is not marked closed. It stops claiming to be open, keeps its confirmed date visible, and says it is worth a call. The four states are explained here.
Where the gaps are, said plainly
Our Area Agency on Aging coverage is complete for California: all 33 agencies, all 58 counties, verified 28 July 2026. 211 coverage was verified 29 July 2026.
Everything past that is genuinely incomplete. Meals, transport, respite and the long tail of local organisations are researched county by county, and we are nowhere near finished. When we have nothing for a county, the result says we have not researched it yet. It never says there is nothing there, because that would be a claim about the county rather than about us.
Which county we research next is decided by which counties families actually ask about, recorded anonymously on every check. That is the only thing the record is used for.
You are the fastest source of freshness we have
If you call somewhere we listed and find it closed, moved, full, or nothing like what we described, telling us is the single most useful thing anyone does on this site. It is two fields and no account.