Amanda Brown Lierman joins us now. She is the executive director at gofundme.org right here at the Fintech TV booth on the training floor of the NYSC. Welcome to the show. It's great to have you.
Thanks for having me. It's so fun to be with just women supporting women.
And of course, for this day, that's ultimately what we are celebrating. We obviously just had an interview in the last block with Rebecca all about this. From your positioning on this conversation, how does the partnership with 11.11 bypass the traditional hurdles specifically for disaster relief?
Great question. So GoFundMe.org was actually launched in 2017 with a mission to meet the needs of individuals and communities that have been impacted. And we do a lot of mobilization in the response just to raise a bunch of money and get it out as quickly as possible. And we had a great lesson last year when we actually mobilized in response to the LA wildfires, working with Paris Hilton and 11.11 Media. She was actually a very early supporter of all of the individual relief granting that we did. And we at GoFundMe.org set this kind of ambitious goal that, to be honest, we weren't totally sure we would be able to meet, but wanted to make sure that we got all of the money out as quickly as possible. We raised nearly $9 million and know how important fast cash is to people. When we were scheming and even dreaming about how to do that in a thoughtful, strategic way, we wanted to be able to support women. We wanted to be able to support the women-owned businesses that are the heartbeat of so many of these communities, just the anchors of where people go and come together and give people a little bit of hope about that community being able to come back. We launched this idea to go support women businesses, found another partner with the Women's Business Center in Pasadena who helped us identify 50 women, and we're really excited about what we learned then to be able to now launch this nationwide fund and take it, you know, scale it even more.
Yeah, and you mentioned the Pasadena Women's Business. Why is it so important to have those partnerships with local entities at the community level?
Yeah, definitely. They I mean, they know what's best, right? Like, we're sitting in our offices, not necessarily in the heat of like, wherever that disaster has taken place. And so we want to be deferential to the needs of that community. They are the experts, they are the ones that should be, you know, deciding where the resources go, they know much better than we would ever know. And so empowering them to then empower their own community members, like that's such a key to the success. And I think so, critical, and one of the things that just makes our sort of philosophy and approach really different. Like, we don't want to be super prescriptive about how the money is used, right? Like, if you have gone through something, I want you to be able to make the decisions about how that money should be used for your household, for your community, for your business. And the same is true here. You want to empower people, help them restore their own dignity in some of these, like, the darkest moments of their life. This partnership with them was just so critical to helping us find 50 incredible women and to be able to support their businesses.
I have less than a minute left, but GoFundMe without a doubt itself is a household name. But how does GoFundMe infrastructure ensure that all these donations are effectively deployed?
Yeah, so our goal is to get fast cash out to people and we are able to do that in a low cost and just super effective manner because of the generous support that the business gives to GoFundMe.org. So GoFundMe.inc supports our operations and makes an annual contribution. And because of that support, we are able to make sure that every dollar that comes into one of our funds is a dollar out to the people who need it.
Amanda Brown Lierman, Executive Director at GoFundMe.org. Congratulations on all the success.
Thank you. Thanks for joining us here at the Big Board. Yeah, to all of us. So thank you.
Of course.
