Since its inception, MyFriendBen has been built alongside our community as a public good for all, using shared open source infrastructure. Today, the MyFriendBen team is thrilled to announce our ability to drive benefit access at scale has been significantly accelerated: MyFriendBen has been awarded $2.4 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to deepen the impact of the tool and expand the screener to other states.
With this support, we are launching an effort — alongside innovative partners like PolicyEngine and Code the Dream — to unlock $100 million in public benefits across multiple states.
Our Commitment To The Benefits Ecosystem
As we scale nationally, we remain committed to MyFriendBen’s founding principles:
- Open source. All code and aggregate impact data are publicly available, inviting transparency and community-driven improvement.
- Collaborative. Partners not only use MyFriendBen, but contribute innovations and insights back into the core product.
- Innovation accelerator. Building shared open tools with a diverse set of partners will mean that we can all get further, faster.
Join Us As We Build In The Open For All
We are building cross-sector partnerships, interoperable applications and APIs, and shared open eligibility rules engines. By pooling talent, data and capacity, we can allow the experts on the ground – including community members and frontline staff – to focus on innovations that create excellent experiences for households.
For example, we worked with partners this year to use MyFriendBen’s open infrastructure to pilot:
- Automated benefit eligibility reports via API with a tax filing system
- A unified application for four benefits geared toward parents of young children
- Automated screening at intake by integrating with a navigation center’s scheduling system and CRM
Let’s make the social safety net more accessible for kids and families. Contact us, and let’s get started today.
