How Michigan On Demand Verifies Every Community Resource

One of the most common complaints about resource directories — whether it's a printed pamphlet, an old PDF, or a search engine result — is that the information is out of date. A food pantry that closed two years ago, a phone number that's been disconnected, hours that changed and were never updated anywhere public. When someone is already dealing with a hard situation, wasting a trip on outdated information makes things worse, not better.

Every listing goes through review before it's published. Resources on Michigan On Demand aren't pulled automatically from the web and published as-is. Each one is reviewed by our team before it goes live — checking that the organization is real, the contact information is current, and the description accurately reflects what the program actually offers.

Residents can flag anything that looks wrong. If you visit a listed food pantry and find it's closed, or call a number that's disconnected, you can report it directly from within the app. Reports go straight to our review queue, and we follow up to confirm and correct the listing — rather than leaving it to quietly go stale.

New resources are added the same way. Anyone can suggest a resource that isn't listed yet — a food pantry, a training program, a shelter — and it goes through the same review process before it's published, so the bar for accuracy stays the same whether a listing was added by our team or suggested by a resident.

Why we do it this way. It would be faster to just scrape listings from the web and publish everything automatically. We don't do that, because the entire point of Michigan On Demand is that when you find something in the app, you can trust it's actually there, actually open, and actually able to help — without needing to double-check it somewhere else first.