Charitas Clew: Bureaucracy is heavy. Let's build the counterweight with Google AI.

I spent Friday night staring at a mock municipal utility shutoff notice. The text was dense. The language was punitive. The deadline was buried in a block of legal code on page two. Generosity usually shows up as time or money, and that kind of giving matters. I think it can also look like removing friction. Millions of vulnerable and non-native speaking families receive legalistic notices, like eviction warnings, utility shutoffs, medical bills, or benefit discontinuances, written in adversarial legalese. The emotional and cognitive weight is massive. These notices are dense no matter who is reading them. I still read some of them twice, and most people meet one while already having a hard week. What I Built I directed the build of Charitas Clew . It is an open-source, zero-judgment paperwork engine for public notices. Charitas Clew ingests overwhelming institutional notices and uses Google AI to decompress the legal gravity into plain-language clarity. Instead of a generic chat interface, it outputs a strict Action Protocol: The Actual Meaning : Demystified in plain, dignified language. Key Dates and Timelines : Pinpoints critical statutory deadlines and grace periods. Simple Next Steps : 2 to 3 actionable, reassuring instructions. Personal Speaking Script : A first-person script the user can read out loud when calling or visiting a clerk, caseworker, or counselor. The whole protocol renders in six languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic, and French. A notice written in adversarial English comes back as plain language in the language spoken at that household's kitchen table. Charitas Clew joins the Clew Suite , my portfolio of civic tech tools focused on making complex systems more inspectable. Demo Live Production Instance: charitas-clew.web.app Firebase Hosting serves the frontend. Every AI call routes through the Express gateway on Cloud Run. Paste a notice or upload a photo of one, pick a language, and read the result. Code earlgreyhot1701D /