One Hope is an Oregon-based nonprofit that has spent nearly two decades doing something deceptively simple: getting the right people in the same room. Since 2007, One Hope has brought together pastors, nonprofit leaders, and community decision-makers to listen, collaborate, and act on the needs of their neighbors.

With a staff of just four, the organization punches well above its weight. Their flagship initiative, Project Hope, launched in 2011, has grown from filling school budget gaps with groundskeeping and painting crews into the largest community back-to-school effort in the region. Today, One Hope runs five neighborhood-specific Back-to-School Fairs across four school districts, distributing approximately 3,800 tickets to families with the greatest need and expecting around 3,000 to show up every year.

The Challenge:

When your event isn’t really one event but five fairs, four school districts, thousands of families, and a vetting process that has to be airtight, a basic ticketing tool isn’t going to cut it.

One Hope’s Back-to-School Fairs require each school district to identify and select the families most in need. That means the ticketing process has to support district-specific access, protect sensitive information between districts, catch duplicate registrations before resources are wasted, and allocate supplies by grade level or school. Getting that wrong isn’t just an operational headache; it means a family that needed help didn’t get it, and one that was already served was counted twice.

With a four-person team managing thousands of tickets across multiple events and partners, Communications Director Kaylee Hamilton needed a platform that could hold the complexity together without creating more work.

“The customizable nature of Brushfire allows us to really let the tool work for us rather than us building our event around the tool.”

Kaylee Hamilton

Communications Director, One Hope

The Solution:

One Hope found that infrastructure in Brushfire.

Brushfire’s customizable ticketing process gave each school district the ability to select and vet their own families independently, within the same system. Districts could view and manage their own sign-ups without seeing what didn’t belong to them. Duplicate ticket detection automatically flagged redundant registrations. And resource allocation tools let the team distribute supplies based on a student’s grade or school, not just headcount.

What could have required a patchwork of spreadsheets and manual coordination instead became a structured, scalable process, one that the team could run reliably, year after year, at scale.

The Results:

Year over year, One Hope distributes roughly 3,800 tickets across their Back-to-School Fairs — and the right families are getting them.

• District-specific vetting keeps the selection process clean and private across four school districts
• Duplicate detection protects limited resources from being double-counted
• Grade- and school-based allocation ensures supplies match actual student needs
• A repeatable system lets a four-person staff manage a multi-site, multi-district community event with confidence

For One Hope, Brushfire isn’t just a ticketing tool but the operational backbone of a program that shows up for thousands of Eugene families every single year.

TLDR

When you’re a small team doing big community work, the last thing you need is software that slows you down. One Hope found a platform that fits how they serve people, and it’s made all the difference.