Oct. 24, 2024
MyFriendBen receives $2.4M grant to expand access to public benefits
New funding will deepen the impact and expand MyFriendBen
By Elise Henson, Executive Director, MyFriendBen
Since its launch last year, MyFriendBen has provided critical support to over 20,000 Coloradans, helping them navigate challenging circumstances. There’s the single dad who got help paying rent, the new parents who learned about child tax credits for the first time, a senior who found a food delivery program and a foster mom who applied for child care assistance.
These are just a handful of the folks who I thought of when I received word that MyFriendBen was awarded $2.4 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to deepen the impact of the tool and expand the screener to other states.
MyFriendBen, which is incubated at Gary Community Ventures, is a benefit eligibility screener that provides households with a comprehensive understanding of the programs available to them. In about 6 minutes, MyFriendBen creates a custom report of benefits and tax credits households may receive as well as their cash value and the time it takes to apply. Most people find about $2,500 a month in benefits and tax credits.
In Colorado alone, MyFriendBen has identified upwards of $800 million in available benefits and delivered an estimated $12 million in value to low-income households to date. The first replication of MyFriendBen is underway in North Carolina in partnership with inclusive civic tech organization Code the Dream, and an increasingly sophisticated set of open source eligibility rules is being built and maintained in partnership with the national nonprofit PolicyEngine.
“The information MyFriendBen provides in 6 minutes can change a family’s future forever. That’s powerful, and we think it’s worth scaling.”
Elise Henson, Executive Director, MyFriendBen
Over the next two years, we will leverage this momentum to proactively scale MyFriendBen’s work in more states, with the overall goal of unlocking $100 million in public benefits.
Two of our guiding values as a team are to make our work joyful and open to anyone who wants to partner. Some of the very first friends of Ben – like Aurora Community Connection, Benefits in Action, Denver Human Services, Get Ahead Colorado at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Jeffco Prosperity Partners and Jefferson County Human Services, Mile High United Way’s 211 Help Center, and The Fax Partnership – remind us every day why this work is so important: the information MyFriendBen provides in 6 minutes can change a family’s future forever.
That’s powerful, and we think it’s worth scaling.
Join us as a technologist, funder, implementing partner or a user … you might be surprised by what Ben finds for you.