About
Every organization I have worked for asked me the same question.
How do we introduce our work to a younger generation, when the donors we have are getting older?
I never had a good answer, and I gave that same non-answer for the better part of a decade.
The organizations asking were rarely large. Most were run entirely by volunteers, working month to month on whatever came in, holding up pieces of their communities that would not otherwise be held up. Their donor bases were getting older and they knew it, so every year we would sit down and build a social media strategy, plan the events, send the emails, refresh the website, and try again.
Most of it was outreach shouting into a room that could not hear us, and all of it took the hours that should have gone somewhere quieter and slower, into building real relationships with the people who actually wanted to give.
What stays with me is how consistent the question was. Every organization asked it, whatever their size or their budget or their board, and my answer never got any better.
Then a friend asked me where to donate something.
For as long as I can remember I have been the person my friends text about this. Do you know an organization that needs baby clothes. Do you know who to call about winter coats. I usually did.
One of those conversations changed the question for me. If people who genuinely wanted to give were routing themselves through one person they happened to know, because they had no other way to look, then the problem was never that organizations needed a better marketing strategy. There was simply no infrastructure for finding them.
My first thought, and I would rather be honest than sound strategic about it, was: what if Spotify and Tinder had a baby, but for philanthropy?
It is a ridiculous sentence, and it was also the right instinct.
The problem was never that people don't want to give.
I have met too many people who want to give and simply cannot find the organizations that match what they care about.
This is also where I part ways with how the argument usually gets made. I am not anti big philanthropy. Large funds and long-range strategy matter enormously, and the sector needs institutions capable of thinking in decades. But there is a real distance between the large organizations steering the ship and the community organizations doing the actual work with actual people, and it does not have to be either or. The money exists. It needs to reach further down.
Philanthropy got very good at the transaction, at the gift and the receipt and the year-end letter, and never really built the part that comes before any of it, the part where you find the thing worth giving to in the first place.
Why now
The largest handover of wealth in history is already underway.
Between now and 2048, an estimated $124 trillion will pass from older generations to younger ones and to charities. Around $18 trillion of that is expected to go to charity directly. It is the largest transfer of wealth there has ever been, and most of the conversation about it inside my sector is about how to capture it.
I am more interested in the fact that the people receiving it already give differently. They are drawn to the hyper local: grassroots movements, direct aid, mutual aid, the organizations working a few streets over rather than a few continents away. They want to know where the money actually lands. And they expect to find all of it online, easily, the way they find everything else.
That last part is what convinced me the timing mattered. A generation that gives this way is not going to work through a directory or wait for a gala invitation. They will look the way they look for everything else, and if grassroots organizations are not there to be found, the money will go wherever it is easiest to give.
Why me
I am not an engineer. I am a fundraiser who got tired of waiting.
The part of fundraising I always loved most was the relationship building, sitting with someone long enough to learn about their life and what made them want to give in the first place. That is slow, specific, unglamorous work, and it is where everything real happens.
This feels like the same work to me at a different scale, learning where the gaps are in a community and what is going unsupported. Building it as a nonprofit person rather than a technologist means I know where the problems actually are, because I spent ten years inside them.
What give GroundUp is, and what it isn't.
It is
It isn't
When you decide to give, you give directly to the organization, the way it should be.
What has been hard
Making sure this does not quietly become the thing it was built to fix.
Data is only as good as what already exists, and small organizations are already the least represented online. So the risk was there from the beginning. Build a discovery tool on thin data and you end up sorting organizations by how much they have managed to publish about themselves, which is really just sorting them by how much capacity they have. The organizations with the least would come out looking like the ones doing the least.
I did not want to build another version of the sites that rank charities. That has meant a lot of slow thinking about what data we generate, how we use AI responsibly, and what we deliberately choose not to measure.
give GroundUp does not score organizations and does not rank them against each other. That is a design decision, not something we have not gotten around to yet.
Most of this has been built with a laptop open somewhere in the middle of my life. Making dinner with one eye on a build. Answering my daughters' questions while something loaded. Sitting outside while they were swinging, glancing up between things, hoping they will understand one day that I did this partly for them.
I am building this as the mother of two girls, which is probably why the question of who gets to be generous sits with me the way it does.
I want them to grow up believing that generosity is not something reserved for people with money to spare, and that it is a commitment all of us get to make.
Why here
The Piedmont Triad is not a test market. It is where I am from.
I was born and raised in Winston-Salem, and I have spent the last seven years working for organizations across the greater Piedmont Triad, in Davidson County and Guilford County. Starting here was not a strategic decision about market size. It is where I live and work, and it is the place I know well enough to get things wrong in front of people who will tell me so.
Come find the work.
give GroundUp is live across the twelve counties of the Piedmont Triad. If you are here, you can start today. If you are not, take a look anyway, and tell us where you are so we know where to go next.
I am building this in public, unfinished parts and all. If you want to follow along, or help, I would love to hear from you.
The organizations are already out there doing the work, the way they have been the whole time.