VivaSLO.org launched in January after several months of development by Shower the People, an all-volunteer nonprofit dedicated to bringing free hygiene services to the county’s homeless population.
Shower the People operations manager David Gross, who developed the website, said he was first inspired to create the guide after consistently receiving requests from clients for guidance navigating health, housing and food services in the area.
“We noticed that a lot of the guests that come to our showers come with a variety of problems and issues, and they ask us for advice, and we don’t always know what to say, and so over time, we had started creating resource cards,” Gross said. “If somebody comes and says, ‘I need a place to stay tonight,’ we can hand them a resource card about shelter, or another one about where you can find some food to eat or clothes for your back, or where to get your water bottle refilled.
“That evolved into eventually making this medical guide to anything that’s involved with health and medicine in San Luis Obispo County, that is for people who are broke or homeless or near homeless, and over time, we’ve just been accumulating information,” Gross continued. Resource guide aims to fill as many needs as possible
Gross said in the process of creating VivaSLO, he took into consideration many of the “oddball questions” he and other Shower the People volunteers encounter, looking to cover as many topics as possible.
He said many of the services that homeless residents request do exist in the county, but the way to access them isn’t always immediately obvious to people whose first concern is their day-to-day survival.
While developing the website, Gross started with the data included on Shower the People’s info cards that he could already easily confirm, such as access to specific food resources, homeless shelter hours and some housing nonprofit applications.
Though VivaSLO is not the first resource guide to be published in the county — with Gross pointing to the Area Agency on Aging’s biannual Senior Resource Guide as a prime example of an existing guide — VivaSLO is likely the first to be consistently updated using automated digital “scrapers” that routinely check resource websites to ensure that its information stays consistently up to date, Gross said.
These scrapers allow VivaSLO to avoid some of the gaps that other guides have encountered when application information or a nonprofit resource’s hours unexpectedly change, he said.
The website itself is organized with a simple search function at the top and a list of aid categories including legal help, mail, device charging, water refills, property storage, health and mental health care and even more niche things such as tattoo removal, end-of-life help and pet care.
It also crucially includes a list of hotlines and emergency contacts that can connect users directly to immediate aid, and offers an advice center that gives homeless individuals guidance on how to speak to case managers effectively and set themselves up for success when dealing with nonprofits, Gross said.
In the process of developing the guide, Gross was surprised by how many resources exist but do not have widespread public recognition, including financial aid provided by churches, community aid and other resources that “aren’t part of the nonprofit industrial complex,” he said.
“If you can describe software precisely, AI can make it exist, and so most of the actual software that’s involved in this is not stuff that I really had to mess with at all,” Gross said. “I just had to describe it to Claude Code, and Claude Code made it, which is exciting — it’s just a miraculous, weird way to do software engineering.”
Of course, with any emergent technology, safeguards and fact-checking is a vital part of making sure the end result is usable, Gross said.
“We hear a lot of negative things about AI these days, but it’s also an incredible tool you can use to turn your creative ideas into reality very quickly,” he said.
With the software side of the guide finished, Gross said he’s turning his attention to getting the guide into as many people’s hands as possible.
Shower the People intends to run an advertising campaign on the SLO Regional Transit Authority’s buses that includes a link and QR code that can take anyone with a phone directly to the website, he said. The nonprofit is also working with homeless service providers in the area to make it a part of their workflows when helping homeless clients.
While the guide can’t be accessed by people without Internet access or Internet literacy — and would likely be about as long as the current 122-page Senior Resource Guide if put into printed form — Gross said he thinks the guide will be an asset to nonprofit service providers at a minimum.
“I’ve been in conversation with somebody at CAPSLO’s 40 Prado who saw this app and got immediately really enthusiastic and said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve already been using this in my work — it helps me to look up things and share them and make sure I’ve got the information right, right away,’” Gross said. “It’ll indirectly help people that we can’t help directly.”
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