When a friend or loved one gets sick or goes through a particularly hard time, we all react differently.  Some of us shower that person with attention, phone calls, and offers to cook dinner or drive to appointments.  Others send flowers and a heartfelt card expressing our sympathy or inspiring our friends to rise to the challenge ahead.  Then there are those of us that recoil, avoid calling, emailing, or stopping by, all the while letting the guilt of our inactions pile on.

Likely, we have all found ourselves responding in more than one of the above ways.  But the reality is that each one of these reactions stems from a feeling of helplessness—fear that we cannot help a person that we love out of the situation they are in.  So, we respond in the way we were taught, or in the way we would like to be treated, or we don’t respond at all and try to deny that this terrible thing is happening to someone close to us.

At GiveForward, we hear stories every day of people battling an illness or battling the financial burden that an illness has caused.  Often, the problem is insurance related, and a friend or family member needs money to have a lifesaving procedure or needs to be released from the insurmountable debt that such procedures have put them under.

We knew when we started GiveForward that there were hundreds of thousands of people each year in this position.  In fact, the ability to fundraise for medical expenses is one of the main reasons GiveForward allows people to raise money even if they are not a non-profit.  So, we were not surprised when medical expenses fundraisers began to accelerate on the site.  But what has shocked us is the role that these fundraisers are playing in the lives of the people who love and care about the person battling or recovering.

Nearly every day now, we receive letters of gratitude…not from the people receiving money but from friends and family who feel empowered by the ability to share in their loved one’s struggle.  It’s not about the money.  It’s about the knowledge that they can be a piece of making someone they care about’s life a little bit better.

Even if fundraising isn’t the answer, if you have a friend or loved one experiencing a particularly rough patch right now, you’re probably not alone in recognizing it.  Get together with friends and find a way to help him or her…you’ll be amazed how strong you will all feel in the end.

On Thursday, September 10th nearly 200 socially minded party-goers enjoyed open bar and tasty hors d’oeuvres courtesy of GiveForward.org and Old Town Social, Chicago’s latest hot spot.

Attendees included our charity partners: Chicago Children’s Charities, PFLAG, Southwest Youth Collaborative, Volunteer Expeditions, Chicago Inner City Outings, and Midwest Young Artists along with a mix of young Chicago professionals.

See NBC’s coverage of the party here![youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpKly8Kfj3w[/youtube]

Don’t worry, if you missed this event, you can still come to the next one…The Ugly Sweater Pub Crawl!

GiveForward is looking for bright, enthusiastic, highly-motivated rising juniors, seniors, new graduates and grad students who want to really sink their teeth into a project and run with it. You must have excellent writing and communication skills, and a sense of humor is a requirement. Additionally, the ability to finish a two pound burrito from Chipotle in one sitting is viewed favorably (see below).

If you are interested in applying, please send a resume and a cover letter explaining why you want to work with us to jobs@giveforward.org. Please include which position you are applying for in the subject line.

We are hiring for the following positions:

College Campus PR/Marketing Master: Are you creative, socially minded and well connected to the Greek community on campus? We are looking to bring major change to the Greek system across the country and we need your help! We are looking for undergraduate students who are leaders within the Greek system to represent GiveForward at Northwestern and DePaul Universities.  Our goal is to make the Greek system in Chicago schools the national model for fundraising by introducing online fundraising pages through GiveForward.

As a Campus PR/Marketing Master responsibilities will include:

* Writing press releases and coming up with buzz marketing campaigns to increase awareness of GiveForward on campus
* Acting as liaison between GiveForward your campus Greek Life Office and Greek System
* Assisting Greek presidents and philanthropy chairs to incorporate online fundraising into their existing philanthropy events

read more…

The sun wasn’t the only thing shining last Sunday.  On September 13, 2009, 30 young, philanthropically minded Chicagoans donned electric yellow Run 4 a Reason tees and hit the pavement with nearly 20,000 runners at the Chicago Half Marathon and 5K.

Each had their own reason to run.  Some ran to green Chicago’s streets, others ran to support Chicago volunteers heading to Katrina affected cities, while others ran to support equal rights for all.  But the true champions of the day were the 16 runners from Chicago Children’s Charities who raised more than $12,000 for ten local charities. read more…

Laura Walker is running the Chicago Marathon this October for the Watoto Wa Baraka orphanage in Kenya.   If you’re going to be in the crowd at the race, chances are you’ll be able to spot her…

Laura wrote to us a few weeks ago with some really nice feedback about her Giveforward fundraising page so we sent her a GiveForward t-shirt that she could wear during her training runs.  Little did we know that Laura is not only an expert marathon runner and fundraiser, but also an expert bedazzler (is that a word? hmm?).  Anyway, after Laura got her shirt, she emailed us and told us she had a sudden urge to “bedazzle it” even though she hadn’t bedazzled anything since she was eight years old.

Well, naturally, we at GiveForward, encouraged said bedazzlement (our official stance on bedazzle has been and always will be: the more bling the better)*.  So we promised Laura if sent us some bedazzled out pics and we’d put them on the Giveforward homepage. Well, a few days later Laura made good on her promise.  So to make good on ours, here are pics of Laura in the best bedazzled Chicago Marathon shirt EVER!!!  Good luck with the marathon Laura!  We know you’ll kick butt!

Laura Walker: fundraiser; marathon runner; expert bedazzler!

Bedazzle extreme close-up view for extra bedazzle viewing pleasure.

* unless said bedazzle is on an Ed Hardy shirt in which case, we think it just looks kind of silly.

read more…

On Saturday August 22nd, GiveForward sponsored our first ChasePoint challenge in City Chase Chicago!  Stationed at the Blues Jean Bar on N. Halstead, our challenge asked contestants to trade either a GiveForward pen or a sticker for a non-perishable food item to be donated to the Chicago Food Depository.  There were two rules: 1. The item had to be bigger than the size of your fist, and 2. There had to be photo documentation of the transaction.

Runners hit the streets, asking passerby, visiting restaurants, and even knocking on people’s doors to make the trade–and they came back with some pretty strange stuff!  As if pork rinds, beef sticks, and gigantic tins of baby corn weren’t enough, donations also included pigeon peas, canned escargot, and my personal favorite: pickled cactus.

Overall the event was a big success, and we were able to collect about 100 lbs of food to be donated to the food depository.  We’re looking forward to continuing our partnership with City Chase next summer and keeping our event focused on charity.  But don’t worry–the challenge changes every year, so we’ll be sure to have a surprise in store for next year’s participants.

In the September issue of Mindful Metropolis (a monthly magazine connecting Chicago’s conscious community), GiveForward was highlighted as one of five social entrepreneurs making a difference in Chicago. The article, written by freelance writer and editor Christina Galoozis, focused on bringing transformational change to the city–one donation at a time. We are so thrilled to be a part of it! Check out our section of the article:

Where $5 Funds a Kidney Transplant

Desiree Vargas, 27 & Ethan Austin, 28

I told a friend about my idea for GiveForward, a website that connects worthy causes with everyday donors, at a Super Bowl party last year, and she surprisingly knew someone with the same idea. Ethan and I immediately hit it off on the phone, and he moved from California to Chicago a few months later to launch the business with me.

As an intern at a non-profit during Hurricane Katrina, I recognized the desire of average Americans to donate directly to afflicted families, and not through large organizations like The Red Cross. At the same time, Ethan had reached $6,000 through a personal fundraising Web page for his first marathon sponsored by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. With these personal experiences in mind, we wanted to give everyone with a credible cause–from transplant surgeries to mission trips–a place to collect small donations, even as little as $1, and reach their goal.

To start, Ethan and I were able to pool $50,000 in capital, which we spent entirely on site development, and GiveForward.org first went live on Aug. 14, 2008. We now generate revenue through the 3 percent fee charged to every fundraiser once they reached their goal, as well as Google Ads. People are generally honest, but we police the site for fraudulent behavior.

So far the site has done amazing things. The largest contribution has been $5,000 to help fund a local woman’s kidney transplant, which we’re happy to say was recently granted by the hospital for a reduced rate. Her sister raised a total of $32,000 on our site. We also sponsor “Run for a Reason,” where runners can raise money through GiveForward for any cause and run the Chicago Half Marathon and 5K together on Sept. 13.

Like our donations, we started out small. Our ultimate goal is to become bigger–like the eBay for giving.