11-04-2025
CarePortal introduced to West Virginia in Monongalia County
MORGANTOWN, (WBOY) — A public event was held in Morgantown Thursday afternoon to officially introduce the local community to CarePortal at Hotel Morgan.
'CarePortal is a connecting technology that connects those people that see the needs of vulnerable children and family in our community, with people who are willing to meet those needs,' said Chestnut Mountain Village Director Greg Clutter.
Clutter told 12 News that in West Virginia and Monongalia County specifically, there are a lot of people in the community who would love to help vulnerable children and families if they were aware of the need. Now, by using this app, frontline people like Department of Human Services (DoHS) workers, Child Protective Services (CPS) employees and other agencies like the local women's center can enter different needs for participating agencies to respond to.
There are 14 churches in Monongalia County that have signed up to participate in this initiative. Clutter said that these churches and their volunteer recruits will be able to see the needs via CarePortal and can help address them.
'Probably more importantly, they're able to give those struggling families connection back to the community,' said Clutter. 'That's not government. It's somebody—it's a neighbor in their community.'
In addition to the local churches and volunteers, local business people can sign up to help out as a 'community champion.' 'If a local carpenter said 'I'd love to be able to be part of this and be able to respond,' they can sign up as a community champion so that they know about the need too,' Clutter added.
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However, Clutter said a caveat is that any community champions would be connected with a local church. 'The more important part of this is not necessarily just meeting that need and fixing that home, it's them meeting neighbors,' he said. 'It's the family getting different connections—social, emotional, other connections in the community because being in this situation—it's lonely, it's isolating.'
The CarePortal initiative is specifically focused on children and families, so communication will largely go through local child-serving agencies. However, the families will always be asked if they'd be willing to accept help prior to having their needs entered into the portal.
According to Clutter, the process to bring CarePortal to West Virginia first began back in 2023. He said that a small group consisting of him and four others wanted to find a way to utilize all the different churches and businesses in Monongalia County to help local families that are in need.
Clutter said that the group's theory is that there are already more than enough resources and more than enough people who are willing to help in the community to help these vulnerable children and families. 'But we just felt like something might be missing. When we dove into it, we discovered we had amazing agencies,' he said.
Clutter stated that CarePortal is a national organization that's based out of Missour and that when his team reached out to the organization, CarePortal shared that they'd never heard from anyone in West Virginia as the state is the 33rd to participate.
'The first hurdle was they had to figure out where to put us,' said Clutter. 'We ended up connecting with someone that was already doing this work in Virginia, and then we got to work and we did a very small pilot project.'
For the pilot, Chestnut Mountain Village worked with Compass Women's Center in Morgantown to see what could be done on a smaller scale. Shortly after initiating the pilot, Clutter said that the then-commissioner under the DoHS asked how they could get involved as well.
'We quickly stoked out a pilot project to say let's try this in a couple communities,' Clutter added. Chestnut Mountain Village then recruited 14 churches, trained the agencies and began the process of putting things in place with the DoHS.
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