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Christopher Gray, 21, a Drexel University junior and CEO/Founder of Scholly, has found a way to make finding those scholarships easier.
Gray himself has been very successful in finding scholarship funds. He is known as the “Million-Dollar Scholar” after being awarded $1.3 million in scholarships.
Over the past three years, Gray has also helped other families manually scour through databases, and figured, “Hey, I need something that can help. There has to be a faster way.”
Gray developed the answer in the form of Scholly, an app that uses eight specific parameters, like state, GPA, or race, to instantly filter through a deep directory of scholarships available for the prospective student.
“It’s extremely simple,” says Gray and that ultimately was the goal.
“The fact that it’s on the mobile (phone) really hits the audience,” says Soham Bhonsle, 21, a Scholly user and Drexel University senior. “It serves the need of its time. We want it on the go.”
Nicholas Pirollo, chief technological officer for Scholly, also offers that apps optimize searches compared to standard websites because they are more tailored to specific needs.
A recent study, conducted by Sallie Mae, shows that 39% of families used scholarship funds to pay for college during the 2012-2013 academic year and Scholly connects users with relevant scholarships in about five minutes. Scholly’s database is updated monthly to remove scholarships that are no longer available, add scholarships, and refresh deadlines.
There is money out there to go to school. Scholly has more than 10,000 downloads of the $0.99 app found in the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Scholly’s costs are intentionally positioned at an affordable price to serve more people that need it and boast a potential big payoff.
“Pay 99 cents and you may get $5,000 or $6,000 in scholarships.”
Scholly helps put the power of funding your education in your hands.
In a small patch of green space on Andry Street in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward, nine garden beds lie next to one another, each 6 feet by 9 feet, each the size of one standard solitary-confinement cell. Each garden bed grows a mix of herbs and flowers, among them pansies, stinging nettles, onions, mugwort. They are a mix of plants with medicinal properties and some that just bring pleasure to the eyes, and their growth is limited to the parts of the tiny space where a person would be free to move in a solitary cell, with space blocked off for where the furniture—nothing more than a bed and a toilet—would be. The plants in each garden are chosen by someone in solitary confinement and planted by a volunteer gardener on the outside.
The result is both symbolic and produces plants with tangible uses, says jackie sumell (who does not capitalize her name), who conceived the project; plants with healing properties will be redistributed to people who need them through what sumell calls a “prisoner’s apothecary.” The solitary beds are eventually overrun with plant life, a visual representation of a world without prisons, an idea that forms the project’s core mission.
Typically, a volunteer gardener on the outside will send a list of plants to an incarcerated gardener. The list provides plenty of options but is limited to what will thrive in the climate and season. They collaborate on a gardening plan and a calendar, often with a small floor plan filled in by the incarcerated gardener laying out the positioning of plants.