The Matchmakers

Team members: Lady June Cole, Terrence Green, Shiva Hodges, John T. Lay, Ashley Lidow, David Lyon, Ameka Neely, Hannah Pittman, Joe Roof

Children’s Trust of South Carolina, the statewide organization focused on the prevention of child abuse, launched SCParents.org, as part of its mission to be a resource for families searching for local services and support for critical needs like housing, food, employment, health issues, legal aid, transportation and others. Children’s Trust recognized that identifying support services from multiple sources can be frustrating and far too time-consuming for families who may be homeless or under tremendous financial pressure with little time to assimilate information. The website provides one-stop access to a list of organizations that assist those families in need. Caregivers and parents can simply enter their zip code into the search bar to return an array of options for free and reduced-cost assistance in their communities.

The Matchmakers group learned through communications with Children’s Trust that there is a need to provide a more robust list of organizations that either connect to needed services or tangibly provide those services. There is also a need to reach out to these organizations to educate them about this website, the benefits it provides to families, and the need to establish a partnership with Children’s Trust through the SCParents.org platform.

To that end, the Matchmakers identified possible partner organizations with detailed contact information and developed an education package for those organizations to entice and secure a partnership with Children’s Trust to make their services available through the SCParents.org website, thus broadening their reach to families in distress.