Terms of service

WhatWay is a free directory that helps you find clinics, schools, and legal or shelter services. It is not a doctor, a lawyer, or a government service, and it cannot promise a place will help you.

Last reviewed 5 October 2026.

In an emergency, call 911

Do not use this site if someone is in danger, badly hurt, or needs help right now. Call 911. In the United States, 911 is free from any phone, works without a SIM card, and you do not need papers to call it.

What WhatWay does

We keep a list of organisations that already serve the public, and we help you find the ones near you. The About page lists the states we cover and how a listing gets checked. For each one we try to show the address, the phone number, the hours, the languages spoken, and whether it serves people without insurance.

What WhatWay is not

Not medical, legal, or immigration advice. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a treatment plan, or legal guidance. Telling you a legal aid office exists is not the same as advising you about your case.
Not a referral or a booking. We do not make appointments for you and we do not tell a place you are coming. You contact them yourself.
Not a guarantee. We do not control these organisations. We cannot promise they are open, that they have space, that they speak your language, or that they will take your case.
Not a government service. WhatWay is independent and has no authority over immigration, benefits, or housing decisions.

The information can be wrong

Hours change, programmes close, phone numbers get reassigned, and funding runs out. We check listings and we fix what we are told about, but at any moment some entries will be out of date.

Always call before you travel. If you find something wrong, tell us and a volunteer will check it.

Where this site uses AI

WhatWay uses artificial intelligence in three places, and we would rather tell you exactly where than let you guess:

Working out what you asked for: Your question is turned into a numerical form and compared against the directory to decide which listings to show. This affects the order you see things in. It does not invent anything.
One sentence of phrasing: The short line introducing the results is written by a language model. Everything factual around it, the name, address, phone number and hours, is copied directly from the listing in our database. The model is never given the chance to write those, by design, so it cannot invent a clinic or a phone number.
Most of the translations: Of the 28 languages offered, most are machine translated and have not been checked by a native speaker. Any language in that state carries a notice at the top of the page saying so. Machine translation can be wrong, unclear, or accidentally rude.

When the search does not find a good match, it is built to say so rather than offer you the closest thing it found. If you get an answer that looks confident and wrong, that is a bug worth reporting.

What this means for you

Automated output can be wrong. Treat what you read here as a starting point for a phone call, not as a confirmed fact. Call before you travel.
No decision is made about you. Nothing here assesses your eligibility, your case, your status, or your entitlement to anything. The software decides which listings to show you and nothing else. There is no profiling and no automated decision-making about any person.
Your questions do not train anything. We do not use what you type to train or fine-tune any model.
It is not a professional. An AI-written sentence is not medical, legal, or immigration advice, and reading one does not create any professional relationship.

To the extent the law allows, we accept no liability for loss arising from reliance on automatically generated or machine translated content on this site. The section on liability below applies to it in full.

If you would rather not use the AI-assisted search at all, call 211. It is free, answered by a person, covers both states, and has interpreters.

Using the site fairly

You are welcome to use WhatWay for yourself, for your family, or to help someone else. Please do not:

scrape or bulk download the directory to repackage it as your own service;
send automated traffic that degrades the service for people who need it;
use it to harass, target, or build lists of the organisations we list, or of the people who use them.

The software and infrastructure are privately maintained. If you want directory data for research or for another nonprofit, write to us and ask rather than scraping it.

Liability

WhatWay is provided free and as is. We are not responsible for what happens when you contact an organisation we list, for a listing being out of date, or for a decision you make based on what you read here. Nothing in these terms removes a right you have under the law that cannot be signed away.

When the WhatsApp channel opens, these terms apply there too. WhatsApp is run by Meta and its own terms apply to the messaging itself. You can reply STOP at any time and we will not message you again.

Contact

whatway2026@gmail.com.

WhatWay is applying for 501(c)(3) status and is not yet a registered nonprofit. These terms have not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. The AI disclosure and the liability limits above are the parts that most need that review: how far liability can be limited varies by state, and Illinois regulates AI disclosure directly.