Support Availability
The listing is stable. The capacity is not.
An organization's name, address and phone number can be correct for a decade. Whether it can take your mother next Tuesday can change in a fortnight, and Support Availability is entirely about the second thing.
What actually changes
Local service capacity moves for reasons that never touch the contact details:
- A grant cycle ends and a program that ran three days a week runs one.
- One coordinator leaves and the waitlist doubles, because the waitlist was that person.
- A county contract shifts a service from one provider to another, and both keep their websites exactly as they were.
- Demand rises in a heatwave, a fire season, or the month after a hospital closes.
- A volunteer driver programme loses two drivers and quietly stops taking new riders.
None of that produces an announcement. There is no feed of it. The organization is not hiding anything: it is busy doing the work, and updating a third party's directory is not the work.
Why this makes freshness part of the claim
If capacity moves and a listing does not, then a listing without a date is not information about the present. It is a photograph of some unspecified past being presented as a window. So every row on this site carries the date it was last confirmed, and that date is shown to the family rather than kept in the back office.
The consequence we accept: a claim expires. After ninety days without reconfirmation, an organization we had verified as open stops being described as open and becomes worth calling to check. Nothing about the organization changed. What changed is what we are entitled to assert, and that is the honest thing to model.
Decay is the feature, not the flaw
It would be trivial to make this site look more confident by letting verifications last forever. Every number would stay green and the coverage would look total. It would also mean that in three years the site would be a confident, comprehensive and largely fictional account of which help exists, and nobody looking at it could tell which parts had rotted. A claim that never expires is a claim nobody is maintaining.
Why waitlists are shown rather than hidden
A common instinct is to hide waitlisted services so results look actionable. It is a kind thought and it costs families months. A six month waitlist is worth joining today. A family that never sees the listing does not skip the six months: they spend six months not knowing it existed, and then join it.
The decision about whether a wait is worth it belongs to the family, and they cannot make a decision about something they were never shown. Where we know the length, it is on the listing. Where we do not, it says so.
What we do not claim
We do not know an organization's internal capacity, its budget, its staffing or its intake queue. Nobody outside it does. What we know is what a named person confirmed on a stated date from a stated source, and that is what is shown.
This is also why Support Availability is deliberately a separate question from eligibility. Whether a programme is open and whether you qualify for it are two different findings with two different sources, and collapsing them produces a confident answer to a question nobody asked. Eligibility for public benefits is Care Entitlement, and it lives elsewhere for exactly that reason.
Where you come in
The single best source on current capacity is somebody who called this morning. If you have just been told a waitlist is closed, or that a programme moved, that is fresher than anything we hold. Tell us. It takes a minute and it changes what the next family sees.