Bowling Green Neighbors started with a stack of laminated cards. Sarah Pannell, a Bowling Green High School student, worked with WxOrNotBG to translate severe weather instructions into the top languages spoken in Warren County: English, Spanish, Modern Standard Arabic, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Burmese, Pashto, Dari, Chinese, Korean, Bosnian, and Haitian Creole. The cards went out across the county, sponsored by Buy Local Bowling Green and private citizens, then placed in businesses, community organizations, and religious organizations who understood that a tornado warning in English doesn’t help a family that speaks Pashto. The cards keep going out. If your business, church, school, or organization wants a stack to hand out, ask and we’ll get them to you. What started as a weather safety project turned into something bigger: a realization that the information families need (for food, for housing, for healthcare, for school, for legal help) already exists, just not in the language someone actually speaks at home.

Bowling Green Neighbors is the same idea applied to everything else. One page. Every resource. Plain language. Real phone numbers. Staff noted when they speak something other than English. Free programs marked clearly. No login, no account, no “are you sure you qualify” gatekeeping. If you live in Warren County and you need help, this page is built so you can find it in the time it takes to make a phone call, not the afternoon it usually takes now.