Since opening a Baton Rouge office less than two years ago, a nonprofit organization called Single Stop has kept a low public profile in the Capital Region, despite getting $5 million in grant funding from the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and connecting more than 1,000 needy individuals to nearly $900,000 in resources and assistance.
But a new Business Report feature says that’s likely to change soon. In January, the organization hired veteran nonprofit administrator Christy Reeves to head up its new Gulf Coast regional office, which is based in Baton Rouge, and to expand the agency’s presence from Louisiana through the Florida Panhandle.
“It’s an amazing organization,” says Reeves, who left her position of eight years as director of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana Foundation to spearhead Single Stop’s Gulf Coast operations. “As soon as people hear about the program they want it. Fast Company just did a story on the most innovative companies in the world, and they listed us as one of them.”
Actually, Single Stop isn’t a company, despite its inclusion on the magazine’s prestigious list. Rather, it’s a nonprofit organization with a unique business model: It uses proprietary software to connect at-risk students in the community college system with the hundreds of federal programs, resources, grants and scholarships they are potentially eligible to receive. Since its founding in New York City in 2001, the organization has connected nearly 1 million households to almost $3 billion in assistance.
“The model is unlike any other,” Reeves says. “There are all these government programs—tax assistance, child care, food stamps, financial aid—and no one knows which ones they’re eligible for. We use technology to help them by plugging some data into the system and within a few minutes we get a complete list of results.”
BRAF played a key role in bringing Single Stop to Louisiana. In late 2011, the foundation awarded a $590,000 grant to Single Stop from a fund created with BP oil spill money. That initial grant helped establish a Single Stop office at Delgado Community College in New Orleans. Within one year, some 1,200 students had gone through the system, receiving more than $1.6 million in assistance—roughly three times the amount of the original BRAF grant.
“We don’t often see a true ROI like that in grant making, so it clearly showed the need for this and the great success it was having,” says BRAF Executive Counsel Edmund Giering. “So we agreed that they should expand along the Gulf Coast, and we asked them to bring us back a proposal.”
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