Why I started Findwell

Findwell started with a fire.

Our chicken coop caught fire, a building twenty feet by twenty-four. We lost almost our whole flock, thirty-one birds. By the time my husband called it in, it was fully engulfed, and the nearest water was a hundred feet away. He was out there alone with a garden hose.

The firefighters arrived in under ten minutes. They put the fire out, kept it from reaching our woods and our house, and got my husband out of a fight he could not have won on his own. Every one of them was a volunteer.

I wanted to do more for them than a muffin basket and a donation. So I started looking into how to actually help, and what I found was hard to accept: departments like the one that saved us are critically underfunded, and a lot of the money meant for them goes unclaimed every year. They qualify for it. They just cannot find it, because the information is scattered, technical, and buried. These are mostly volunteer crews. They answer the call in ten minutes, and then they are on their own to hunt for grants they may never track down.

That is the whole point of Findwell: save fire chiefs their time, and help departments get more of the money that is already set aside for them. They save lives. The least the rest of us can do is make the funding easier to reach.

It grew from there. Keeping information accessible matters to me, and I believe the tools we build with AI should give something back to the communities they learn from. Findwell is one way to do that. The plan is to grow it into a large, free library of resources for all kinds of underfunded and overlooked communities, one verified library at a time.