TennHelp.com

Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services - 030036

Abstract Number: 030036

May 2004

Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services (TALS) partnered with the National Association of Social Workers, Tennessee Chapter (NASW) and the Tennessee Department of Children's Services (DCS) to launch www.TennHelp.com, a website designed to connect people with social services. The TennHelp website enables users to locate service providers through a three-step process. The user begins by identifying the issue he or she needs help resolving and the user's county of residence or zip code. TennHelp.com then returns information for the user identifying organizations near the user's home that can assist the client in resolving his or her problem. In addition to being used by social services professionals, legal services staff, and clients, TALS has found that legislative staff members are particularly excited about the project as it enables them to quickly refer callers to legislative offices to appropriate service providers near the caller's home.

TALS staff is currently conducting outreach to educate the public and social services providers about this new online tool. A small steering committee and larger group of partner agencies provide input to TennHelp.com. A particularly interesting aspect of TennHelp.com is that this website, which already includes almost 3,500 agency listings, is actually housed within Tals.org, Tennessee's statewide legal aid website which was designed on the open source technology through Kaivo, Inc. TennHelp.com is funded through an LSC Technology Initiative Continuation Grant. To learn more about this project, access the press release and the publicity post card below as PDF documents. Visit TennHelp.com online at: http://www.tennhelp.com/.

Contact Information:

Melissa Carro
Director of Communications
T.A.L.S. (Tenn. Alliance for Legal Services)
1808 West End Avenue, Suite 1216
Nashville, TN 37203
Phone: (615) 627-0956
Fax: (615) 627-0964
Email Email

Additional Information:

• TennHelp.com Press Release, "New Statewide Website Helps Tennesseans Help Themselves," 29 March 2004. (36kb, PDF)

• Publicity Post Card, "The 3 easy steps to finding help across Tennessee," March 2004. (70kb, PDF)

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