Beacon — AI-Powered Community Resource Navigator

Inspiration

37 million Americans live in poverty, and millions more are one emergency away from crisis. The information they need about Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8, and legal aid is scattered across dozens of websites with different eligibility rules and application processes. For someone already in crisis, this complexity is a wall. 211.org receives over 20 million calls annually from people seeking services, and call centers are overwhelmed. We built Beacon to be a 24/7, always-available supplement — a compassionate AI navigator that meets people where they are.

What it does

Beacon is a community resource navigator built on DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI. It helps people find the public services they need — healthcare, housing, food assistance, and legal aid — through a warm, simple chat interface. A user describes their situation in plain language — "I'm about to be evicted" or "I need to find a doctor but don't have insurance" — and Beacon responds with real, actionable information: program names, eligibility basics, how to apply, and contact details. All powered by a curated knowledge base of genuine US public service data indexed through DigitalOcean's RAG infrastructure. Beacon also detects emergencies and immediately surfaces crisis hotlines (911, 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, 211) before answering.

How we built it

AI Agent: We created a Gradient AI agent with carefully crafted instructions that make it empathetic, clear (8th grade reading level), and safety-conscious. It never provides medical diagnoses or legal advice, and it detects emergencies immediately.

Knowledge Base (RAG): We curated over 37 KB of accurate public service information across four domains — healthcare (Medicaid, community health centers, mental health resources), housing (Section 8, emergency rental assistance, shelters), food (SNAP, WIC, food banks), and legal aid (Legal Services Corporation, pro bono programs, tenant rights). This data is indexed in a DigitalOcean Knowledge Base using section-based chunking and RAG, so the agent gives grounded, accurate answers instead of generic LLM guesses.

Frontend: Next.js 14 with Tailwind CSS, designed mobile-first for the target audience. Features include:

Four category quick-start buttons so users don't have to figure out what to type Emergency banner with clickable 911 and 211 phone links — always visible Clean, warm UI that reduces anxiety and builds trust Accessible design: keyboard navigable, proper ARIA labels, high contrast

Evaluations: We configured an automated evaluation dataset with 10 real-world scenarios covering routing accuracy, emergency detection, and response quality.

Challenges we ran into

Crafting agent instructions that are empathetic without being condescending — our target users are often in difficult situations and may feel shame asking for help Curating accurate, actionable knowledge base content that covers the right programs without overwhelming users Designing a UI that feels safe and trustworthy for people in crisis, not like a generic chatbot

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The emergency detection that immediately surfaces 911/988/211 when someone describes a crisis A genuinely accessible, mobile-first UI designed for stressed users — not a chatbot template Real, curated knowledge base content with actual program names, eligibility info, and contact details Fully open source — any community organization can deploy their own instance

What we learned

DigitalOcean Gradient AI makes it fast to go from idea to working agent — the control panel and knowledge base infrastructure handle the heavy lifting RAG with well-curated knowledge bases dramatically improves response accuracy over generic LLM knowledge Thoughtful agent instructions matter more than model size — clear behavioral rules produce better results

What's next for Beacon — AI-Powered Community Resource Navigator

Multi-agent architecture with specialized agents per domain and intelligent routing Multilingual support (Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese) Location-aware responses using zip code to surface local resources Integration with 211.org's API for real-time service availability SMS interface for users without smartphones Partner with community organizations for region-specific knowledge bases

Built With

• 14
• ai
• css
• digitalocean
• gradient
• next.js
• platform
• python
• tailwind
• typescript