A little late but - 3 year anniversary of Crypto for the homeless!

Hey guys, I'm the guy running crypto for the homeless. We recently just had our 3 year anniversary (4/28/19 start date) a couple months ago - this post is a little bit late.

For those of you who don't know, crypto for the homeless (CFTHL) is a non-profit organization I created with the intention of doing something unique with crypto while at the same time helping the needy.

I started it completely out of pocket at the start and was able to get the organization of its feet immediately due to the massive support shown from social media (mainly reddit).

I never set out to "solve" homelessness, as I think that is a systemic problem that even governments can not fix - but rather to re-introduce a human aspect of charity that I felt was sorely missing from most other projects (at least in my opinion).

We differentiated ourselves by utilizing all of the funds we received thus far on food/goods for the homeless, and also delivering food straight to the homeless/needy. In addition to this, we have photo documentation of all food hand outs as well as receipts dating back to the very first time we handed out food (3+ full years of photos at this point) which I believe no other charity has come close to doing.

While we had very humble beginnings, we are proud to have 501c3 status for 2+ years now, and also recently launched our brand new website http://cryptoforthehomeless.com (check it out).

We also have had a massive amount of volunteer support (people buy and hand out food for us and get reimbursed in crypto). Our partners in New Zealand have been doing the most amazing work consistently for us and I could not be prouder. https://imgur.com/a/cBoAUNg - here is an album of some of their recent work.

In terms of donations, we have received enough (roughly $75,000 thus far) to last us probably a decade or more of work at our current rate (if we ration the spending to maintain our current rate), which I view as a massive success and also a guarantee of our longevity.

I've learned a ton from running this project thus far - and I've used a lot of it to try and improve the project if possible.

1. It is impossible to satisfy 100% of people with ANY project - for this one in particular, there are those who oppose helping homeless people in general and thus they will inherently hate this project no matter what I do.
2. It is impossible to make this project 100% "trustless" despite what most people who have that criticism say. It is ultimately a project based on human work, and the best that I/we can do is provide a massive amount of proof of work (which we have) that should be used as a basis of our legitimacy. At this point, having 3+ years of photos as well as documenting over $20,000 donations in monero should be more than enough proof of our legitimacy (in addition to reimbursing 100% of our volunteers who participated properly).
3. A lot of people want to steer the project in many different directions - ultimately the project's design is a very personal thing when it comes down to it. I personally created it with a very specific vision in mind - and that may not align with what you(or other people) feel the best vision is. That is perfectly fine - and you/they are free to create a project to carry out that vision in the same way I have carried out mine. Projects like this cost time/money and the very fact that enough supporters on the internet have funded this project to last us 10+ years now at least shows that we have a reason to exist. I am beyond grateful for this support and intend to respect the intentions of our donors for the extreme long term.

Which brings us to future plans -

We currently have a couple people including myself dedicating quite a lot of time each day working on the websites/social media/communicating with volunteer prospects/etc. There are actually a lot of things that occur behind the scenes that are very time consuming and we could use 1 or 2 more people working with us on the team on various things (social media/engagement/etc). This is one of our top priorities right now - so if this is something you can see yourself doing - please reach out to me, even if the amount of time you can commit is small!

Also, as I have stated earlier - we are proud of the fact that all of the funds thus donated to us have been entirely dedicated to the buying and reimbursing of food/goods for the homeless (and I intend to keep it that way). One repeated suggestion that I have had was to pay our employees for their time, even minimal. Because of our pledge to not use the funds for that purpose at the start, we had to come up with a different solution which is as follows:

https://www.flowcode.com/page/lmcfthl - these are wallets we set up for the sole purpose of optional support to provide our employees (again this is just to have the option there - we absolutely do not require anything to continue to operate, but if you want to support the employees that have been working completely free since the start this is the way to do it).

That about sums it up for now - I hope we met/exceeded the expectations of those of you who have followed us from the beginning - if not, we will try even harder going forward. Feel free to post any and all criticism/suggestions/support/anything and we will take it all in!