Kalpana Kalpana (Editor)

YouCaring

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Type of site
  
Crowdfunding

Headquarters
  
San Francisco, CA, US

Commercial
  
Yes

Available in
  
English

Website
  
youcaring.com

YouCaring is a crowdfunding website for personal and charitable causes. YouCaring take 3% of donations as a fee for donation processors PayPal and does not charge financially for their platform.

Contents

History

The company was founded in July 2011 by Brock Ketcher, Naomi Ketcher and Luke Miner. [youcaring.com/about]

Notable Fundraisers

  • Musical group Doomtree created a YouCaring campaign for rapper P.O.S to help cover the secondary costs associated with a kidney transplant.
  • Dickon Edwards, former lead singer of Fosca and guitarist/lyricist for Orlando used the site to help raise money for funeral costs for his brother Tom, guitarist for Adam Ant.
  • Science fiction author Jay Lake used the website to pay for whole genome sequencing, towards the "small possibility that the results of such a test...may suggest a treatment path" for his colon cancer, which since 2008 has "progressed from a single tumor to metastatic disease affecting the lung and liver, recurring after multiple surgeries and chemotherapy courses." After his successful campaign, Lake publicly criticized Paypal for the terms and processes the company uses when it thinks there's a fraud risk. His experience was cited in news coverage over Paypal's public promise to introduce "aggressive changes" to its frozen funds policy.

    • Controversies

  • On November 7th, 2016, YouTuber h3h3Productions created a video entitled "Hugh Mungus Needs Our Help" with a link to a YouCaring page raising funds for Rudy Pantoja Jr. for cancer treatment and to help him financially. Rudy is also known on the internet as "Hugh Mungus" after an incident involving a woman named Zarna Joshi, who accused him of sexual harassment after he used said gag name. This YouCaring page was created not only to help Mr. Pantoja but also as a direct response to Zarna Joshi's YouCaring page which was raising money for her "well-being", which was widely criticized online as self-serving after Pantoja used all of his notoriety on the internet to direct attention and contributions to a charity called Hope Soldiers based in Seattle, Washington and Joshi used hers to ask people to send her money. After Ethan Klein of h3h3Productions created the YouCaring page, the site was overloaded with traffic and was inaccessible for several hours. When the site's functionality returned, they revealed on Twitter that they had removed the donation page because "the subject matter incites controversy, does not have a clear cause, and does not fit within our listed categories" even though medical treatment is one of their categories. YouCaring is already facing widespread backlash on social media for this decision, and the donation page created by h3h3Productions made plans to move to GoFundMe. As of November 15th, h3h3Productions has raised $147,567 of the $10,000 goal.

    • References

    YouCaring Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA