Civic infrastructure · Completed 2020–2021
The MANYC Hotline was a telephone system built during 2020 and 2021 to connect New Yorkers seeking mutual aid with volunteers and community resources.
I led the project and owned its overall direction and delivery. The work brought phone routing, volunteer availability, schedules, voicemail, text messaging, and operational data into one system.
How it worked
Incoming calls entered an interactive voice flow built with Twilio Studio. Twilio TaskRouter connected callers with available volunteers. Recorded prompts supported several languages, including Arabic, Bangla, Creole, English, French, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, and Yiddish.
A Node.js and Express service handled the custom logic that did not fit inside the visual call flow. Its routes covered call assignment, language selection, volunteer connections, voicemail recordings, transcription events, incoming SMS messages, and TaskRouter workspace events.
Airtable served two jobs. It gave operators a practical interface for entering and reviewing information, and it stored configuration used by the service. Scheduled jobs synchronized worker availability and opened shifts at defined times.
Twilio Functions handled serverless call-flow behavior, including dynamic schedules. The main API ran on Heroku. Keeping the Studio flow, serverless functions, API, tests, and deployment files in Git preserved changes outside Twilio’s visual editor.
What the project included
The completed system included:
- a Node.js and Express API
- Twilio Studio call flows
- Twilio Functions and deployment scripts
- Airtable data and configuration
- multilingual voice prompts
- voicemail recording and transcription
- SMS and volunteer-routing logic
- automated tests for API routes, schedules, and Twilio services
- a high-level call-flow diagram
The project started in April 2020 and remained active through 2021. The hotline described here belongs to that period. The current Mutual Aid NYC site has the latest public information for people seeking help.
- Role
- Project lead
- Technologies
- Twilio Studio, Twilio TaskRouter, Twilio Functions, Node.js, Express, Airtable, Heroku