CTO Eric Lukoff and CEO Rey Faustino. Photo by Vignesh Ramachandran.

Rey Faustino wishes there had been something like One Degree when he was a kid.

The San Francisco Bay Area-based founder of One Degree – a nonprofit working to help low-income families access nonprofit and social services – grew up as a low-income undocumented Filipino immigrant in Southern California. RELATED LINKS

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“My family struggled to find resources that we needed – things like health resources, immigration services, even things like after-school programs and summer programs,” Faustino said. “We just didn’t know who to talk to or who to trust or what we were eligible for.”

Faustino, who has worked in the nonprofit sector for the last decade, decided to tackle this problem head on. While attending the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, he studied public policy and wrote the initial business plan for what would become One Degree.

One Degree’s first product today is a free, online database that anyone can browse and search to find social services such as food banks, employment services and health clinics. It’s been called the “Yelp for social services,” he said, and is currently focused on San Francisco and Alameda County in the Bay Area.

Registration isn’t required to use the site, but those who create a profile can provide some information about themselves—such as location, age, family size, income—and receive curated recommendations. Over 10,000 people searched for resources on One Degree in 2014, according to Faustino, and he anticipates that to significantly increase this year. With the Bay Area being one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, housing is a popular search on One Degree, he says, for information on affordable options and rental assistance.

It’s been a series of growth milestones for One Degree. Last year, Knight Foundation awarded the organization a $35,000 prototype grant to fund the development of its Web product, 1deg.org. Faustino says participating in design thinking workshops, part of the Prototype Fund process, encouraged his team to talk to users and improve the product. For example, One Degree discovered people wanted a Spanish version of the site, which the startup developed and launched.

In 2014, One Degree also went through prestigious Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator – a rarity for a nonprofit organization.

“To be placed in … a completely different world, completely different context [pushed] us to think differently and approach this work in a very different way,” Faustino said.

The intense Y Combinator experience allowed the nonprofit startup to make helpful connections, work on its product and gain traction by proving there was a need for One Degree, he says. This month, One Degree added two new staffers, growing to a team of five people.

Free and open data is part of One Degree’s fabric. In Wikipedia-style fashion, organizations can add themselves on One Degree–although the site will have a layer of review. One Degree even has an open API for developers, meaning anyone can access its data to build on it. For example, Faustino said someone has developed an Android app that can search One Degree.

Down the road, One Degree aspires to “be the connective tissue that underlies the nonprofit sector and the way people access the nonprofits and services that they’re using,” Faustino says. One idea he tosses out is a common application for different organization registrations.

“You can easily buy a book on Amazon by clicking on one button, but why does it take 30 applications for a low-income family to apply to like 30 different housing developments?”

And while it’s not set in stone, One Degree plans to expand to other Bay Area communities,  including Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. But the goal for now is to continue community outreach and show people how to use One Degree, Faustino says.

“What really gets us up in the morning and keeps us up at night is: How do we, like, really make this ultimate impact of helping families break the cycle of poverty?”

Vignesh Ramachandran is a frequent contributor to Knight Blog.

The Knight Prototype Fund accepts applications on a rolling basis to help take ideas from concept to demo. The next deadline is May 15, 2015. Apply here.