To help the right students find the right colleges, by putting the people who know them at the center.

Across the country, thousands of community-based organizations walk students toward college. They run advising sessions after school, help with financial aid forms at kitchen tables and ride the bus to campus visits. Most of them do it with a small staff and a smaller budget.

They also do it alone. Each organization keeps its own spreadsheets, its own contacts and its own list of programs it happened to hear about. A fly-in with travel paid for can go unfilled in one city while a student who was a perfect fit sits two states away, because the two never met.

The William H. Douglas Foundation is one of those organizations. It built the tools it needed for its own students, and then saw that the same tools could link every CBO that does this work. CBOs of America is that link.

A student can now ask a machine to write an essay, list activities that sound impressive and smooth every rough edge out of a resume. Many feel they have to, because everyone else seems to. The result is an application that looks perfect and sounds like no one.

Colleges see it too. When every file reads the same, it gets harder to find the student behind it: the one who works weekends, who translated for a parent at the doctor, who rebuilt a grade after a hard year.

A counselor at a CBO knows those things, because they were there. They have met the family. They have read the first draft, the real one. That knowledge cannot be generated. It is why CBOs matter more now than they ever have, and why we built a platform around them instead of around an algorithm.

Organizations keep their students, their team and their daily work in one workspace. Colleges publish their fly-ins, visits, summer programs and scholarships once, and every organization on the network sees them, with a count of which of its own students fit.

When a college wants to meet a student, it asks the organization. The organization decides, then the family decides. Only then does a name change hands.

The William H. Douglas Foundation funded the building of this platform. It did so to help organizations like itself, not to sell to them.

A CBO that pieces together a database, a messaging tool, a form builder and spreadsheets from outside vendors spends about 4,000 USD a year. On CBOs of America the same work costs a CBO 500 USD a year. Schools pay nothing. Students and families never pay.

There is no fee per student, per referral or per enrollment, and there never will be. A student is not a lead. The foundation's backing is what makes that promise possible.