About Charity For Debt

Overview:
Charity For Debt (CFD) is a brand new project that hopes to provide a valuable service to students / alumni with debt, local non profits, and giving individuals / businesses. We saw three major problems that CFD could address:

• 1. Many students and alumni have considerable student loan debt that causes financial strain
• 2. Non profits do not have enough consistent, reliable, and motivated volunteers. They spend many hours managing and training volunteers that leave and turn over is always very high.
• 3. Local businesses and giving individuals usually can not see the results of their giving and do not feel in touch with how their money is being used.

So, CFD hopes to solve these problems by using donations from business and individuals to pay volunteers student loan debt for providing time and energy to local non profits needs.

History:
Honestly, the original idea of putting together students with debt, non profits, and local businesses to do good things was created in the United Kingdom by a 22 year old named Ian Wallace. Their project is called DoGood4Debt and you can read about it here. Their website does not work right now, we aren't sure why. They had some initial success and saw an opportunity to expand, but the founder left for Africa and the project has not moved forward much.

We thought the idea was great and wondered why something like this did not exist in the United States. So, we started with the general concept, changed some of the ideas (DoGood4Debt requires volunteers to pay a $20 fee to sign up and we thought that would slow volunteer sign ups) to make the project our own. Next, the two founders (Jonathon and Brandon) decided to put together this website to gain some initial interest. We are meeting with leaders in Washington DC and beginning to talk to potential funders to help us get a couple pilot programs off the ground.

Who is behind Charity for Debt:
Right now there are only two founders. Jonathon and Brandon are both 29 and are from Oklahoma where they met at the University of Oklahoma. Jonathon currently lives in Washington DC and Brandon lives in Carrollton TX. Both Jonathon and Brandon are experts in marketing, public relations, sales, and Internet technologies. The founders both work for companies during the day, but wanted to do something positive for the community by starting this project up. Someday, Jonathon and Brandon hope to see CFD grow into a well known and influential non profit that makes positive change for all communities in the United States.

If you want to contact Jonathon and/or Brandon, simply write to us at charityfordebt@gmail.com or you can find us on Facebook through the CFD Facebook group.

Vision, Mission & Goals:
Our vision is to have 10,000 CFD local "franchises" serving their local community constituents, which are volunteers with student loan debt, non profits who need motivated volunteers, and donors. We hope to someday have over 1 million volunteers serving hundreds of thousands of non profits.

Our mission is to provide innovative and positive services for our three constituent groups.

Our main goal right now is to fund two pilot programs of our concept in Washington DC and Dallas TX (possibly Oklahoma City as well). We need a total of $50,000 to have a real impact and have a large enough sample to learn from and show meaningful results. We are very results oriented and intend to make a real difference.

Media Resources:
If you are the media, we need your help. You might be an influential blogger, a newspaper writer, have a podcast or even on television. If so, we are here to tell our story on how we are going to change the United States! We will be posting official press releases here sometime soon, but in the mean time if you would like an interview about the project, please email us. Charity For Debt is a great story to tell!

For more information, visit our Media Resources page.