Catapult is a service that lets you donate to projects around the world that help women and girls.
And–what do you know?–helping women and girls, especially in the developing world, is a key to boosting development even more.
There is no shortage of quality organizations working on issues related to women and girls, but many are in danger of closing; they raise under half the average amount of what other charities and nonprofits are able to raise. Now there’s a place for these organizations to get some real help from the public–and instead of making a donation into an organizational black hole, donors can see exactly what will happen with their cash, courtesy of a new fundraising platform called Catapult.
Catapult, which is being hosted at advocacy organization Women Deliver, is a crowdfunding platform for organizations that are working for women and girls, running the gamut from a project that provides grants to women entrepreneurs in Senegal to an organization raising money to fund reproductive health education in the Philippines.
“Looking around the whole advocacy space, it was really clear that this was a missing piece where we could create a place where all the issues that impact girls and women are posted for people to go to, and they could give and take action in alignment with their philanthropic preferences,” says Maz Kessler, founder of Catapult.
Just eight weeks into a beta launch, Catapult has over 80 organizations on the site–and some of the initiatives, like the aforementioned reproductive health education project for Roots of Health, are almost funded. It helps that the site has an association with Women Deliver, a well-respected organization in the space. There’s also just a hunger for this. “Certainly the need is close to infinite,” says Kessler. Currently, there are 140 organizations on the waiting list.
Like Kickstarter and so many other crowdfunding sites before it, Catapult lets donors see how far along projects are to being funded, and how many people have given money along the way. The budgets for each project are laid out for all to see. Roots of Health, for example, needs $1,800–$315 for contraceptives, $1,310 to pay the nurses who will teach reproductive education classes and offer free clinical services, $95 for transportation, and $80 for medical supplies.
via FastCoExist – Ariel Schwartz