The Best Two Grand We Never Made

One of the things I've always wanted to do with give GroundUp is be honest about what building it actually looks like. So here's where we are.

Right now, give GroundUp is live across the Piedmont Triad. We've built profiles for hundreds of small, community-rooted nonprofits. These are the organizations doing remarkable work that rarely surface when someone goes looking for a place to give. Not because they aren't making an impact, but because the infrastructure to find them has never really existed.

So far, people using the platform have self-reported nearly $2,000 in donations to organizations they discovered through give GroundUp.

I'll be honest. That number won't impress everyone. It would be easy to round it up in spirit, to make it sound bigger than it is. But it's one of the milestones I'm most excited about.

Those gifts weren't processed through give GroundUp. We don't take a percentage. We're not a transaction platform. Every dollar represents someone who found an organization, decided it mattered to them, and chose to support it. That path from discovery to generosity is exactly what I pictured more than a year ago, when I started building this.

So where do we go from here?

We do what every good group of beginners does. We iterate. We learn. Rinse and repeat.

Every search, every organization someone saves, every self-reported gift teaches us something about how people actually discover the causes they care about. Which organizations resonate right away? Which extraordinary nonprofits are still getting overlooked, even on a platform built to surface them? What moves someone from "that's interesting" to "I want to help"?

The goal has always been to move more resources toward grassroots organizations that have spent years doing extraordinary work without visibility. And maybe, just as importantly, to help someone discover that they're a philanthropist, even if they've never once used that word about themselves.

So that's the work right now. We're listening to what the data is telling us, making discovery easier, and continuing to learn what actually inspires generosity.

There's plenty left to build and even more to improve. But the idea that started all of this is beginning to show up in the numbers. Grassroots organizations get overlooked because discovery is broken, not because people don't care.

If you haven't explored give GroundUp yet, I'd love for you to spend a few minutes browsing. You might find an organization in your own community that's been doing incredible work all along. You just hadn't been given a way to find it.