BOSTON — Boston’s Horizons for Homeless Children gets most of its funding through donations and money workers say these children need now more than ever.
"84% of our families lost their jobs during COVID. So imagine living in a homeless shelter in one room with all of your children and not being employed," said Tara Spalding of Horizons for Homeless Children in Boston. "Massachusetts actually led the nation in growth of family homelessness last year."
These heartbreaking statistics got the attention of Grafton company goimagine.com. The online marketplace launches Tuesday for the sole purpose of fighting against homelessness and hunger among children.
"The goal of our marketplace is to prove to the world that e-commerce businesses can focus on social good instead of investor returns and still be successful," said founder Jon Lincoln.
Online shoppers spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year and much of that money goes to major corporations. His handmade marketplace brings together thousands of entrepreneurs and buyers who want to reward generosity over corporate greed. It’s what he calls a caring economy.
"Uber is a great example of marketplace," said Lincoln. "One person drives another person needs a ride and they transact on Uber and Uber gets a fee in the middle. Now those fees, while small, when you scale those, it could become billions and billions of dollars across all these e-commerce marketplaces. We are the first Marketplace to ever donate 100% of our profits to charity."
He says all it takes is a few large corporations to help decrease the wealth gap especially since it disproportionately affects communities of color. At Horizons’ for example, that’s about 75% of the children they serve.
"Every dollar has a huge impact on what we're doing," said Spalding. "We are working with children and their parents, who all come to us from homeless shelters, and we're providing early education opportunities, and working really closely with parents to help them move out of homelessness.
Goimagine.com has already gifted Horizon’s $1000 of profit made during its’ testing stage.
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