Scholly’s Christopher Gray has been an impact investing success story.
Scholly has raised $200,000 from Rise of the Rest and from a local startup fund in Philadelphia. The app, he says, now serves over 600,000 students and has raised over $20 million in scholarships.
Scholly’s Humble Background
The son of a single mother in Birmingham, AL., who struggled to make ends meet, Mr. Gray remembered his experiences of needing substantial financial aid and the laborious research and work to land the $1.3 million in scholarship money to attend studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
He says it was those experiences that helped him decide to start Scholly.
Next Steps
He plans to make an Android version of the app and make the apps available to 300,000 young people as part of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance.
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Scholly’s success, Mr. Gray says, is based on its patent-pending algorithm and “a lot of elbow grease.” Scholly employs eight parameters to match student and scholarship: information including gender, state and race, but also more customized data because so many grants are specialized. “For returning students, vegetarians, left-handed students,” he quips.
Even the algorithm, he says, cannot distinguish scams: Staffers weed out scholarships that could be yours if only you supply a Social Security number. Graduate students—the “Scholly Squad”—do the sifting. “They’re the quality assurance people.”
Karen Starks, on the faculty at the School of Social Work at the University of Alabama—who mentored Gray during high school—also volunteers at South Gwinnett High School in Georgia. Out of her own pocket, she recently purchased the Scholly app for all 600 seniors in the school.
When she observed students logging in to the app for the first time, she says, “You should have seen their faces when they started seeing that they qualified for 20, 30, 40 scholarships—some students got over 150 hits right off.”
Scholly, she says, is “changing what students think that they can achieve. They have proof that says: There may be help out there; I can reach that goal.”
Sources: Smithsonian, Scholly
