Community help: free and low-cost services, in Spanish and English
community_helpThe guide's bilingual community directory: free and low-cost services for people who LIVE and WORK on the East End. Immigration legal advocacy, sliding-scale and no-status-asked clinics, food pantries, the winter shelter, tenant-rights and wage-theft hotlines, ESL / GED / citizenship classes, childcare and youth programs, money transfer, Spanish-language Mass times, the Latino markets, and the Sunday soccer. Call this for any I-need-help question — unpaid wages, eviction, a doctor without insurance, English classes, food, a lawyer for an immigration case — and for anything asked in Spanish. Answering from memory here means naming a national hotline or a legal aid society that does not serve this county, and the asker loses a day's work finding that out. Every record carries phone, source, sourceUrl and lastVerified, and the guide's own text in BOTH languages (description.es / description.en): quote the Spanish as written rather than translating the English. Two things are computed rather than stored: nextSpanishMass / nextEnglishMass, the next service from right now on the East End's clock (America/New_York) — 'today at 7:00 PM' means today here — and inSeasonNow on the soccer leagues for this month. offEastEnd: true marks a real referral to Bay Shore, Hempstead or Central Islip: still the right answer sometimes, but say the drive out loud. NEVER volunteer that a service is free, confidential, or safe regarding immigration status unless the record's own words say so — quote those verbatim where they appear and attribute them, and otherwise give the phone number. Never name a provider that is not in the results. Pass query in the asker's own words, in either language; need is a shortcut vocabulary; town takes the asker's own place words. With no argument nothing is looked up — you get the needs and towns covered, so ask. Returns up to 8.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| need | No | Shortcut category, when the question is plainly one of these. | |
| town | No | A hamlet ('East Hampton', 'Riverhead') or a region ('the Hamptons', 'North Fork'). Pass the asker's own words. | |
| query | No | What they need, in their words and either language, e.g. 'my boss hasn't paid me', 'clases de inglés', 'food pantry', 'misa en español', 'dentist', 'help with rent'. |