Massachusetts

State programs

35

Local offices

589

Nonprofits

30

Food sites

21

Services by kind of help

• Housing187
• Education131
• Care95
• Work79
• Food68
• Money66
• Legal help37
• Health32
• Safety29
• Other22

• We read official pages and trusted lists: county and city websites, state agencies, Feeding America, the Legal Services Corporation and community action networks.
• A research file counts only when it passes the same checks it must pass to reach Front Door. A file with a problem waits until it is fixed.
• Every service and organization names the page it came from and the day we read it.
• We rebuild the files with every release of Front Door. The API reads only these files, never our live database.

Each HSDS table, how many rows it has, and the fields we fill in. The free sample has the same fields.

• organizations659 rows, 74 in the sample

  id, name, alternate_name, description, website

• services746 rows, 75 in the sample

  id, organization_id, name, alternate_name, description, url, status, application_process, eligibility_description, assured_date

• locations609 rows, 63 in the sample

  id, location_type, organization_id, name, description, latitude, longitude

• service_at_locations676 rows, 64 in the sample

  id, service_id, location_id

• phones1,276 rows, 134 in the sample

  id, number, extension, service_id, location_id, organization_id

• schedules86 rows, 6 in the sample

  id, service_id, location_id, freq, byday, opens_at, closes_at, description, notes

• addresses606 rows, 63 in the sample

  id, location_id, address_1, city, state_province, postal_code, country, address_type

• service_areas809 rows, 98 in the sample

  id, service_id, name, description

• languages2 rows, 0 in the sample

  id, service_id, name

• taxonomies3 rows, 3 in the sample

  id, name, description, uri, version

• taxonomy_terms36 rows, 36 in the sample

  id, code, name, description, taxonomy, taxonomy_id

• attributes5,604 rows, 583 in the sample

  id, link_id, link_type, link_entity, taxonomy_term_id, value

• Changes made by organizations that claimed their listing, and links we fixed after a check, reach these files later.
• Hours are listed for food sites. For offices and programs, call or check the source page.
• The API has no full-text search, ZIP code or distance filters yet. The files cover bulk use.

Please credit Front Door and say which release you used.

Front Door (localcarehub.org). Human services in Massachusetts, HSDS 3.3.1, release 2026-10-10. CC BY 4.0. https://localcarehub.org/open-data/massachusetts

@misc{frontdoor_hsds_ma_20261010,
  author = {{Front Door}},
  title = {Human services in Massachusetts, HSDS 3.3.1, release 2026-10-10},
  year = {2026},
  note = {HSDS 3.3.1. CC BY 4.0},
  url = {https://localcarehub.org/open-data/massachusetts}
}

Our own research is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: the offices, the state programs, the descriptions we write and how we match records to kinds of help. Records from public sources keep their source's terms, and each one names its source. Check the source before you rely on a record.