2020 Strakosch Venture Competition — Spotlight Company #1
Meet GiveCard: A Fintech Non-Profit Organization that Supports the Homeless.
GiveCard competed at the 2019 Strakosch Venture Competition, where they placed 3rd and won the Social Impact Award. Within the year, GiveCard has gone on to present at Mass Innovation Night and was featured in BuiltInBoston’s Top 50 Startups to Watch in 2019.
The founders are a group of Boston College students that have created an innovative and new way to tackle homelessness in a world that has become increasingly cashless. GiveCard’s mission-driven entrepreneurship has taken street-level donations to digital, cashless donation systems. They provide partnered homeless people with regulated debit cards that regulate and restrict certain items purchased.
Lurein Perera, Director at GiveCard, shared, “A core value of GiveCard is de-stigmatization… There’s a huge misconception that the homeless got there through substance abuse or poor choices… Part of the mission behind our movement is to shift people away from pity and ‘voluntourism’ and towards seeing things as a serious public policy flaw and gap in the social safety nets.” If you are interested in learning more about GiveCard, check out their website here.
And if you want to learn more about GiveCard and their experience at last years Strakosch Venture Competition, join us on FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 2020 at 5PM EDT on our Instagram for a live Q&A session with GiveCard.
GiveCard took the opportunity last year to enter the Strakosch Venture Competition and walked away with a $7,000 check. Any BC student can also do the same and win even more prize money! There is still time to enter Start@Shea’s annual Strakosch Venture Competition. The application can be found here and if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to us via our email listed below! The application is due 04/14/2020 at 11:59pm EDT.
Thanks for reading! We are Start@Shea, the student executive team of the Edmund H. Shea Jr. Center for Entrepreneurship at Boston College.
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