GiveForward President & Cofounder Desiree Vargas
(To read the entire article, visit: OM-Times Magazine March 2010 Edition)
Before starting GiveForward, I worked at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City giving grants to colleges and universities for their entrepreneurship centers. It was an incredible learning experience in strategic giving, as I got to see first-hand how much access to information people and foundations with money have before they give.
I remember being distraught when Hurricane Katrina hit because I, and so many of my colleagues, wanted to employ the same practices we used every day with the few dollars that we personally had to give. But, there was no easy way to give directly to a family wanting to rebuild. We talked openly about how much more we would give if we knew money wasn’t being lost in the bureaucracy of the whole situation.
I thought to myself that there should be a site where people can give directly to people and causes they care about.
But, I didn’t do anything with that idea until my 25th birthday. On March 1st, 2007, I was sitting in a restaurant waiting for my friends and family to come help me celebrate my birthday. Like so many other people my age, the fear of the unknown path of my life was weighing me down. I sat there facing the reality of my quarter-life crisis, wondering what others my age were doing to cope. Some were going to law school, some to business school, and still others were living for the weekends in a dead-end job, too scared to leave their benefits and steady paycheck for something bigger.
I was toying with ideas on how to help people transition from one career to another when it was like a light went on in my entire body.
I knew right then that this was THE idea. Create a site that lets people raise money for anything…charities, new companies, research projects, volunteer travel, even medical expenses.
For the next few months, I investigated competitors, looking to see who was doing what. I was both excited and surprised to find out that during the moments my idea was being born, Change.org was debuting online. A few months later, I met Andrew Mason, who was founding ThePoint.com, and I began to wonder if I wasn’t too late to get started.
Having no money and no networks in Chicago, I tabled the idea for a while. But every so often, ideas would pop into my head about new ways people could use the site.
In November of 2007, on a long, soul-searching trip to Costa Rica (where I was born), I started thinking more and more about this site. Change.org had proven to be a site for non-profits; ThePoint was more about social action than philanthropy; and I knew the need for this service still existed.
Then one night, this little voice in my head woke me up, and it literally whispered “get started.” I got up, made a pot of coffee and worked at my laptop from 1am until 7am writing what would be the foundation of my business plan.
I had been throwing around names for weeks, and the next day it came to me. GiveForward.org. I wanted the name to convey what we were asking people to do…give small amounts of money for people and causes they care about now. I never was comfortable with the idea of waiting until later in life to give back, so this name was perfect.
What was even more perfect, though, was the fact that someone had let the domain “GiveForward.org” expire two months before.
After that first wave of inspiration in Costa Rica, I realized that I now had to commit to starting GiveForward full-time, or I would never do it. The first challenge was convincing my mom that my Ivy League education and experience at Kauffman had prepared me for this salary-less voyage.
I told her my plans over the phone as I drove from New Orleans to visit my grandpa in Austin, who was unsuccessfully battling non-hodgkin’s lymphoma. I remember the look on his face when I told him that I was going to start a business with no money and no connections, based on a conviction I had in the middle of the night. He wished me good luck and sent me on my way back to Kansas City to see my mom. Admittedly, I had hoped that my passion would compel him to support my efforts, but I was far more concerned with spending quality time with him than I was about any money he might help me with.
A couple of days later, I packed up the car and drove to Kansas City. On the way, I picked up an audio book of the The Secret at a Cracker Barrel. I had always been raised to believe that you get what you put out into the universe and that positive thinking can change everything. So, I was open to this trendy book. I listened to the soothing and sometimes annoying repetition of the power of positive thought and spent nearly the entire drive to Kansas City envisioning the successful company that GiveForward would become.
When I got to Kansas City, I called my grandparents to let them know I was safe. My step-grandmother got on the phone and told me to check the mail in the next few days. Two days later, I received a check from them for $5,000. When my boyfriend found out, he wrote me another check for $5,000 as a loan. He said that he had wanted to support me and that now that I was getting serious, he felt confident in my success.
From there, the positive connections continued to roll. I went onto Prosper.com and told complete strangers a detailed description of what I was trying to do. Within 7 days, I had $10,000 in the bank from people lending me $50 and $100 at a time. Around the same time, I went to a Super Bowl party and started telling a friend about my idea. She mentioned that her friend had a similar idea for a site and offered to connect us.
For several weeks before, I had been thinking about how I needed a partner, envisioning what that person would be like, and how I would find them. Suddenly, within 1 month of deciding whole-heartedly to pursue this dream, I had money to launch, a partner to join me, an office in downtown Chicago, and support from friends and family all over the world.
In many ways, the company we’ve created reflects this early journey. We help people raise the money they need to make their dreams come true. Sometimes those dreams are to volunteer in Africa or help cure a disease by sending money to research. But more often than not, the dreams on our site are to help keep someone we love with us for longer.
Since our site launched in late 2008, we have helped people raise over $1 million dollars for things like chemotherapy, organ transplants, and transportation and living expenses. But not only do we provide an easy way to raise money for people we love, we also make it so that the people surrounding a person battling an illness can contribute in a way that makes them feel less helpless. By leaving words of support and donating a small amount of money to someone you care about, you directly contribute to their recovery and you help relieve the financial burden that illness can cause.
Because, the most important thing a person who is sick should focus on is getting well.
For more information, visit: www.giveforward.org
