Case Study: City of Pittsburgh achieves confidential, scalable crisis and peer-support services with Twilio

How pittsburgh’s 311 service went remote in less than a week with twilio

Trans Lifeline, founded in 2014, is a peer-run crisis hotline staffed entirely by transgender operators that has answered over 88,000 calls and runs a Microgrants Program that has dispersed nearly $400,000 to support legal ID changes and other needs. The organization needed a distributed, low-cost communications system that preserved caller and operator anonymity, supported remote volunteers across North America, and respected its policy against non-consensual active rescue while reaching a global and often isolated community.

Using Twilio, Trans Lifeline built a conference-based, recorded calling system with a custom dashboard for operators and QA, plus masked-number messaging for Microgrants applicants — preserving anonymity while enabling quality review and distributed volunteering. The platform’s reliability and scalability supported a 35% year‑over‑year increase in calls, expansion into Spanish-language services (funded by a Twilio.org grant), and continued growth of its reach and microgrant support.

City of Pittsburgh

Santiago Garces

Director of Innovation and Performance and CIO