It’s a major victory: helping a homeless man get a place to live in San Francisco after 15 years on the streets. His salvation came from high school classmates who found him online. And they found him through a startup website that’s acting as a kind of social-network-cum-Kickstarter for the city’s neediest residents.
The site, HandUp, gives nonprofit agencies a way to put profiles of their clients online, along with those clients’ needs, pictures and personal appeals. That gets around a common dilemma that even HandUp’s co-founder Rose Broome encounters herself.
“I don’t give money out on the street,” Broome says. “And I respect if people want to give cash as well, but we think by building a system where there is this transparency, where you do know that the money is going to basic needs, that people will give more.”
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