www.sdchamber.org

2-1-1 San Diego

By:  Meg Storer, Communications and Public Affairs Coordinator, 2-1-1 San Diego; on behalf of the SDRCC Health Education and Communications Subcommittee

All you have to do is dial 211!  Every hour of every day, someone in San Diego County needs to know where to find child care, employment assistance, utility assistance, legal aid, access to affordable healthcare, or volunteer opportunities. With the thousands of health and human services agencies and programs in our region, finding one’s way through this maze is daunting.

2-1-1 San Diego removes this maze.  By dialing 211, San Diegans now have a single place to turn to for non-emergency information and resources.  The 2-1-1 hotline and online database provides free, confidential, 24-hour access to community, health, and disaster resources. For other nonprofit agencies and businesses, 2-1-1 provides a connection to the community for clients and employees.

Dial  2-1-1 and you will be  linked to a highly-trained live phone specialist who can answer questions about resources and services that match your needs and which are in your community.  Information is confidential and offered in more than 150 languages with the help of a language service.  2-1-1 San Diego’s online database of nearly 3,000 services enables anyone with internet access to find community resources and search by program or location at  www.211sandiego.org.

Just as importantly, 2-1-1 functions as the County of San Diego’s identified communication source to the public during local disasters.  During last month’s firestorms, 2-1-1 answered 120,000 calls from San Diegans looking for evacuation information, shelter assistance, and recovery information with help from 1,200 volunteers.  As a private non-profit, we could not have done this without the help of our partners which include the County of San Diego, Qualcomm, Google, IBM, and San Diego Futures Foundation.

Continuing in our mission to provide easy access to services, information is available through TTY for the hearing impaired, and, most recently, from all major cell phone service providers.