AWS Public Sector Blog

Brightpoint uses AWS to build CARA, an AI-powered chat assistant connecting families to critical resources across Illinois

Brightpoint uses AWS to build CARA, an AI-powered chat assistant connecting families to critical resources across Illinois

Brightpoint serves more than 37,000 children and families throughout Illinois, putting prevention at the center of their work to help families before small problems become life-altering crises. With support from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Children’s Health Innovation Award program, which provides both cash and AWS credit funding to registered nonprofit organizations, Brightpoint built Connection Assistant & Referral Agent (CARA). CARA is an intelligent, multilingual, and judgment-free digital assistant that makes it easier for families to find and connect with the right support anytime, anywhere. This always-available chat-based assistant enhances how Brightpoint connects families to resources, providing an additional assist to Brightpoint staff while strengthening the overall system of care across Illinois.

Breaking down barriers to family support

Families navigating complex systems face significant barriers when seeking support. Finding the right resources for home visiting, mental health services, childcare, and financial stability programs requires knowledge of available services and how to access them. Families can struggle to connect with appropriate resources, especially outside of traditional business hours when their Brightpoint team isn’t available.

Brightpoint recognized that their most knowledgeable staff members possessed invaluable expertise in connecting families to resources, but this knowledge wasn’t evenly distributed or accessible to families around the clock. The organization needed a solution that could provide the expertise of their best staff members through a self-service experience that could communicate in any language. This challenge was particularly urgent given Brightpoint’s commitment to prevention and their goal of reaching families before small problems escalate into major crises.

Building an intelligent solution with AWS

CARA was built using AWS services in close partnership with the AWS Cloud Innovation Center and AWS Professional Services teams. The custom solution uses multiple AWS technologies to deliver a comprehensive family support system:

  • Amazon Bedrock powers generative AI and natural language interactions, enabling CARA to communicate naturally with families in any language.
  • Amazon DynamoDB provides secure and scalable data storage for the centralized referral database.
  • AWS CloudTrail provides governance and monitoring across the entire system.

Every component of CARA runs on AWS infrastructure, providing the reliability, security, and flexibility needed to scale statewide as Brightpoint expands access to more families across Illinois. Behind the scenes, CARA powers a centralized, continually updated referral database that captures real-time insights into community needs, identifies trends by geography, and gives staff the tools to rate and refine referral partners.

Resources from the Children’s Health Innovation Award, a category of the AWS Imagine Grant, helped Brightpoint access AWS experts to design and implement CARA from start to finish, so the solution could meet the complex needs of families while maintaining the highest standards for security and scalability.

Preparing for statewide impact

CARA is currently available to participants in Brightpoint’s Doula and Home Visiting programs in Central and Northern Illinois as part of a pilot. This pilot marks the first step in a phased expansion across the state, ultimately aiming to make CARA available to the more than 37,000 children and families that Brightpoint serves in programs throughout Illinois.

CARA’s mission-driven design addresses three critical areas. First, it makes it easier for families to find and access benefits and services such as home visiting, mental health, childcare, and financial stability programs. Second, it uses AI responsibly to deliver personalized interactions. Third, it collects structured data with consent to improve referral follow-through and provides system-level insight into unmet needs.

Brightpoint’s staff are eager to see the value this tool will bring to the families they work with, as well as the support it will provide to staff who help navigate complex systems to meet family needs. The organization plans to measure several key indicators as CARA rolls out, including tracking how many people sign up to use the tool, what kinds of questions or services they’re searching for, and whether they’re successfully getting connected to resources as a result. Over time, Brightpoint will analyze gaps and trends in the types of support being requested to help identify where additional funding and community resources are most needed.

Lessons learned for nonprofit technology implementation

For nonprofits exploring similar technology projects, Brightpoint’s team emphasizes the importance of staying grounded in both purpose and process while keeping an eye on the tradeoffs made at every step of design and build. Even a relatively narrow use case such as helping families find the right referral can reveal unexpected complexity.

The organization discovered that data preparation required significantly more manual work than anticipated. It took 2 months to collect and manually clean their data after AI-assisted cleanup failed, requiring a manual review of 1,400 records. The team also had to make nuanced design choices about how many responses to surface, in what order, and whether to show exact matches or related services families might not think to ask for.

Brightpoint’s advice centers on expecting iteration, embracing imperfection, and remembering that staff are often key users and cocreators in the process. The organization acknowledges that many more lessons are sure to come as they continue rolling CARA out to families across Illinois, but their partnership with AWS has positioned them to adapt and scale their solution as they learn from real-world implementation.

How you can support Brightpoint

Visit Brightpoint to learn more about and support their work to advance the wellbeing of children and families here. Even small donations make a big difference!

To learn more about how AWS helps public sector organizations deploy AI-driven solutions, connect with the AWS Public Sector team today.

Michael Shaver

Michael Shaver

Michael Shaver serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Brightpoint, formerly known as the Children’s Home & Aid Society of Illinois. A steadfast advocate for children and a distinguished leader in the field of child welfare, Mr. Shaver possesses extensive expertise in social service programming and nonprofit management. His previous roles include President and CEO of the Children’s Home Society of Florida (2014–2019) and Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President for Children’s Home & Aid. In the public sector, Mr. Shaver held various positions at the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services (1998–2003), culminating in his role as Deputy Director of Budget, Research, and Planning. His national board service encompasses Voice for Adoption, the Children’s Home Society of America, and the National Children’s Behavioral Health Association, where he chaired the Public Policy Committee. Mr. Shaver holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Colorado College.

Jules Marenghi

Jules Marenghi

Jules is a business development manager at AWS. She contributes to the team managing the Imagine Grant program and its associated conference, supporting nonprofit organizations worldwide in their use of cloud technology.

Kathryn Mattie

Kathryn Mattie

Kathryn Mattie serves as Chief Information Officer at Brightpoint, where she leads organization-wide technology, data, and quality-improvement initiatives to strengthen outcomes for children and families, modernize operations, and support staff decision-making. Her career spans leadership roles across the nonprofit, private, and public sectors, including advising Wicklow Capital on social-impact technology initiatives; serving as Director of the University of Chicago’s Master of Science in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (MSCAPP) program; and leading enterprise technology initiatives as Executive Director of Information Technology at GCM Grosvenor. Earlier in her career, she worked in the City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology, partnering with the city’s first chief data officer to improve government services through data and technology. Kathryn holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in philosophy and political science from Boston University.