Students with a van and a spreadsheet
The Global Initiative is a student-led nonprofit. We collect things people need, sort them, and hand them to organizations that already know who needs them. Then we publish what it added up to.
Why it works this way
Most of what a nonprofit does well comes from years of relationships we don't have yet. What we do have is a school, a neighborhood, and a few hundred people willing to clear out a closet if someone asks them to.
So that's the job we took: be the part that collects. Find an organization that's already good at the rest, and bring them more than they had. It's a narrow role, and it's one we can actually do well while we're still in school.
What we hold ourselves to
We finish what we start
A drive gets an end date before it gets announced. Both of ours ran to that date and closed. We'd rather run two drives properly than announce six.
We don't handle what we can't place
Every drive has a receiving organization lined up before the first box comes in. Collecting things with nowhere to send them just moves a problem into someone's garage.
We publish the real number
If a figure is on this site, it came from something we counted or a value the receiving organization gave us. We don't round up and we don't estimate.
We stay out of the way
The organizations we give to have been doing this far longer than we have. Our job ends when the boxes are delivered, and that's the right place for it to end.
Where we're going
More drives, and more kinds of them. We're set up to run collections for health, environment and relief work as well, and haven't yet — mostly because we haven't found the right organization on the receiving end. That's the thing we're looking for, more than volunteers or money.