General
Bridge4Good was a platform created to help homeless shelters and food banks get supplies during COVID-19 simply and securely. In speaking to shelters and food banks, we realized many had closed and those that were open were struggling to get supplies, as usual donors were also staying away.
Visit our Donate page. Scroll down to find all of the charities you can donate to. Click “donate” on the shelter of your choice, and then “donate supplies” or any other donations the charity accepts. This link will take you to an Amazon page with a wish list your selected charity has created with the items they need. For the items you wish to buy, click “add to cart”. Once you have added all the items you wish to donate, click “proceed to checkout”. After this, you must choose a shipping address. Be sure you select the address of the charity and click “use this address”. Then, write your “gift message” and click “save gift options and continue”. Choose your preferred payment method and click “use this payment method”. Finally, change the quantities of items to what you wish to donate, and place your order to help those in need!
To join our team, sign up to be a volunteer on our Volunteer form! We currently have three volunteer teams: Outreach, Tech, and Marketing, and we can always use your help!
You can also get involved by running a personal fundraising campaign for a charity of your choice! Email us at [email protected] to learn more!
If you are a charity looking to get on our platform, register on our Register Your Charity form and we will be in touch shortly! Thank you for all the inspiring work that you do to lift up those in need.
Our platform is soon going to allow young people to create personal campaigns to raise supplies for their local charities. We are also going to begin hosting multiple fundraising events for the charities we serve. Bridge4Good will become the platform where youth come together to help some of the most vulnerable people.
We are a not-for-profit organization, so all of the money donated goes towards purchasing supplies for shelters or food banks. We have achieved a 501(c)(3) status, so we are now exempt from taxes.
As we are an Amazon affiliate, Amazon gives us back a very small percentage of the proceeds. Your donations go directly to the charity of your choice.
Bridge4Good was established by a group of teenagers from across the US, who share a passion for using technology to solve social problems. We came together as part of a virtual hackathon and conceived this idea. To learn more, visit our About Us page.
Data
No. The donor information is not passed onto anybody unless you explicitly “Opt-in” and want the information to be shared with the charity you are supporting for tax relief purposes. The donor information is also stored securely on the cloud. No payments are made on the website. You pay directly on Amazon.
Data is used to run a donor-to-shelter matching algorithm that removes bias between shelters. It makes sure your donations are going to be distributed to the people who need them most. The information in the algorithm is not passed on to anyone else, unless you opt-in to giving data to the charity you donate to.
Charities
We would love to help your charity gain access to supplies. If you are interested in being on our platform, we require that you sign up on Amazon Smile and create a wish list of supplies you need. This setup is simple and we are happy to walk you through it! Please contact us at [email protected]. If you already have a Smile wish list, great! You can register your charity on our Register Your Charity form.
Tech
The website is hosted on Microsoft Azure. We intend to use Python and ML to prioritize and target our fundraising and outreach efforts to homeless shelters or food banks in areas of increased poverty and homelessness, and those that have not received as many donations. This ensures no food bank or homeless shelter benefits unfairly.
Machine Learning is used on our platform to maximize impact and address specific geographical areas of need. The intent of the machine learning models is to decrease and eventually remove the inherent mismatch between the geographical distribution of donors and the vulnerable populations. We conducted an analysis of the homeless populations, economically impoverished states, and distribution of donors and volunteers in order to drive our outreach efforts. Our dedicated Outreach Volunteer Team is currently focused on getting shelters from the top 5 states where this disparity was noted onto the platform.