www.montereycountynow.com NOVEMBER 13-19, 2025 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 surprise knock on the door, it’s almost always because they are in a crisis. This type of scenario—a person in desperation when it comes to paying the rent or utility bills or having enough money for food—is not shocking to the people in this room. This coalition of government and nonprofit agencies is acquainted with helping people facing hard times. What they are focused on today is a potential solution to help those constituents get the help they need more efficiently. And Josh Madfis, vice president of community investments at United Way Monterey County, thinks he has the answer. “The goals of the Smart Referral Network are to help residents access, navigate and benefit from services in our county,” Madfis tells the group, “and to improve outcomes.” Madfis is presenting to this roomful of agency representatives as an evangelist for the system, hoping that they will adopt the Smart Referral Network. But before he traveled around pitching agencies on why to use it, he saw a gaping hole in the technology used to deliver community services in a web of dozens of nonprofit and government agencies. So he decided to invent a better way. Madfis is not a tech guy, but he has become one, spending roughly half his time developing and pitching the Smart Referral Network. After college, he served in the Peace Corps as a teacher in Chad from 1994-96. “That really lit a fire for me,” he says. He continued teaching children and educators—on the Hopi and Navajo reservations, on the island of Mauritius—and then worked for a refugee camp in the Republic of Congo, managing 16 different schools, some of which he visited by canoe. He started to develop ideas for how to best deliver education in difficult circumstances. “If there isn’t collaboration it’s chaos, and there’s duplication of services,” he says. “I started to really develop a passion for collective impact.” His career brought him back to the United States, and eventually to United Way Monterey County in 2017. He quickly started to see a frustrating recurrence of a problem—it was hard for clients to get the help they are entitled to and to navigate systems that are supposed to help them, but in actuality can be quite cumbersome. “Even if you do know what’s out there, you might not know if you’re eligible or how to access it,” he says. You might get a referral to call a particular organization—maybe a behavioral health agency suggests you are also available for SNAP benefits, or a county supervisor’s aide thinks you might qualify for emergency housing. Even the 211 call system managed by United Way might suggest places to call for your urgent need—such as addiction counseling, rental assistance or food—but it’s up to the caller to follow through. What if, instead, the agency doing intake passed along a client’s information to everyone else, and those agencies contacted the person in need? “We tried to develop a referral that actually results in a referral,” Madfis says. To do that, Madfis reached out to tech developer ThinkLogix. United Way hired them for an initial $45,000 to build a referral system. The result became the Smart Referral Network, which case managers at 90 agencies in Monterey County have signed an MOU to utilize. United Way eventually spent $363,000 on the project, plus staff time and other indirect costs. It got off to a bit of a slow start with just 42 referrals among eight participating agencies in 2019, then got a jumpstart in 2020 when California American Water contracted with United Way to distribute utility assistance for people who needed relief on water bills. Then came a rental assistance program from the City of Monterey, launched in mid-2020 during the pandemic. The County of Monterey’s Department of Social Services hired United Way to distribute nearly $1.25 million in federal CARES Act money, then came a contract from the County to distribute $50 million in state relief funds. Suddenly, the portal was booming—in 2021, 44 agencies used it to make 13,350 referrals. Since it launched six years ago, it has resulted in 18,317 referrals made, although the annual usage dropped off a cliff after the pandemic, to just 488 referrals in 2024. (That decrease was due in part to the end of pandemic relief programs, and also the region’s Medi-Cal provider, Central California Alliance on The Smart Referral Network also includes a chatbot (left) so users can find local resources they might be eligible for online at 211montereycounty.org. Right, the system tracks data on referrals. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS
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