Benefit Bank has helped provide over $2B in public benefits to low-income households

Public benefits and social programs exist to help stabilize low-income populations, but the process can be tedious and even inaccessible.

Social enterprise Solutions for Progress (SfP) has built a business around creating access to those benefits through services such as The Benefit Bank, a repository of local social services that screens people for benefit eligibility while they get their taxes done.

Like many social enterprises and nonprofits that aim to end the cycle of poverty, Solutions for Progress inherently hopes to map out an end to its own existence. Ten years into the Benefit Bank’s existence, the service has reached a milestone that brings SfP one step closer to achieving its goal.

According to a blog post on the company’s website, the Benefit Bank has helped approximately one million people receive over $2 billion in benefits.

http://www.solutionsforprogress.com/tbb2b/

In the post, SfP urges readers to think of that $2 billion figure in the context of the social impact it’s created.

“The importance of this achievement is exemplified in the meal that provides sustenance and relief to a hungry family in Dayton, OH whose cupboards would be bare were it not for their SNAP benefit; a suffering child’s visit to a doctor’s office in Greenville, SC made possible by CHIP; and the gentle radiant splendor of heat, courtesy of LIHEAP support, in a single mother’s small studio apartment on a frigid winter’s day in Pittsburgh.”

Solutions for Progress is one of the first B Corps in Philadelphia, and is one of many social enterprises advocating for Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez‘s proposed legislation that aims to expand incentives for local B Corps.