Jody Boyd

I've been working in the nonprofit field for a little over 20 years, though I came to this work through personal experience rather than a traditional path. After watching my childhood friend Michelle Singleton, a single mom of 4, battle breast cancer at age 29, I saw firsthand the lack of resources available to single parents facing a cancer crisis. That experience led me to found The Singletons, which just turned 20 years old this past April 1st. Our organization walks alongside families where either the parent or child is going through cancer, focusing on budget relief, emotional well-being, and community support. We restock homes with essential supplies, provide meal kits through our community kitchen with our culinary director, send birthday bash boxes so no child's celebration is missed, and run our Singleton Santas program where families get adopted by the community for the holidays. I'm most proud of purchasing our community center building in 2020, even though I had to board it up for a year and a half due to COVID and city permit delays. Thanks to angel investors who believed in the vision, we opened the center and now serve three times as many families as before. In 2015, I was chosen as part of CNN Heroes, which was an amazing experience that included a 3-day workshop at the Annenberg Foundation in LA. They flew all of us there and really focused on giving organizations further education to do even better work. We had calls from all over the world wanting a Singletons in their town, but I wasn't prepared at that time to expand. Now, with a multi-year grant, we've opened a small satellite location in Texas to explore what expansion outside Phoenix could look like. My goal is to eventually have chapters in other areas where the need is even greater.