QARAVAN launches a new website and bilingual knowledge portal
With 18 years of experience addressing urgent queries from community members, QARAVAN has launched a new website and a knowledge portal built to put critical survival and support information directly into the hands of people in need.
“As someone who’s been through the process myself, I understand how critical it is for community members to be able to find the information they’re looking for in a timely fashion,” says Ezra Abdullabekov, Interim Executive Director at QARAVAN, who initiated the overhaul of the organization’s digital presence.
“We’re not getting a lot of unique questions. Whether it’s about immediate safety, legal status, healthcare, or basic local resources, a lot of the questions we get are repetitive. We are trying to serve our mission best by staying nimble and empowering our community members to help themselves as much as possible. We’re always here for them, but it’s better when they can find the information they need in one place, rather than waiting on us to manually answer the same questions over and over again.”
How the portal works
The new portal guides a person in need through seven simple questions about their specific circumstances and automatically compiles a tailored list of the resources most relevant to their situation. Users can then save their guide in one of two formats:
- A short PDF, usually up to three pages, with direct links to relevant sections of the online knowledge base.
- A longer, complete version with every piece of information included in full text.
That way, a case coordinator or a community member who doesn’t have reliable access to a phone or internet can print the entire handbook out at a public library and take it home with them.
Built with AI
Building a custom, multilingual resource engine like this on a nonprofit budget wouldn’t have been possible without artificial intelligence coding tools. QARAVAN moved away from clunky external development platforms and used Claude Code to build the exact services and workflows its community needed.
“We understand the concerns around AI and its impact on the environment and society,” Abdullabekov explains. “However, we think it’s critical for us to acknowledge the reality that a lot of our community members are already using AI, and to practice the same harm-reduction approach that has proven effective over and over again in healthcare: responsibly utilizing what it can offer us while strictly protecting personally identifiable information and opting out of any kind of model training. To protect our community’s digital safety, we also use frontier models to safeguard against cyber vulnerabilities and have joined Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program, which gives us access to Mythos models that have proven in many cases to be more thorough code evaluators than humans.”
Seven more languages
Currently available in English and Russian, the portal will expand to include Turkmen, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Tajik, Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz and Spanish in the coming weeks.
“We see this as an information equity issue,” Abdullabekov adds. “Where we can, we should use emerging technology to ensure equal access to critical information while remaining cognizant of harms and advocating for thorough, clear guardrails from the government. Having a search- and chatbot-optimized knowledge base on LGBTQ+ issues and safety in languages where there isn’t much information available is an absolute win.”
About QARAVAN
QARAVAN is a New York nonprofit community of LGBTQ+ immigrants, asylum seekers and allies, founded in 2008. It brings people together, publishes free resource guides in Russian and English, and organizes Brighton Beach Pride.