Just Peoples

Christey completed her Master's in International Development while working for NGOs in Vietnam, Japan and the Philippines. Christey's career in the non-profit sector initially had a focus on human trafficking, first through researching causes of trafficking and later working with survivors of trafficking in Singapore, reporting their cases to the Singapore government and assisting them in their journey to recovery and justice.

After several years working "in the field" Christey realised she wasn't best placed to solve the complexities of poverty in foreign locations, but she'd worked with great people who were. So in 2015 Christey co-founded Just Peoples, a non-profit that sources funding for grassroots NGOs across Asia and Africa by connecting them with people who want a transparent, rewarding and personal way to contribute to global poverty. As Chief of Impact she currently works with local project leaders in 11 countries to create sustainable solutions to localised poverty.

There are motivated, talented people all over the world with solutions to poverty, who don't have access to funding to implement or scale their work. There are also people all over the world who care about global poverty but don't know where to start to do something about it. 

Just Peoples exists to support local entrepreneurs who just need funding in order to alleviate poverty in their own communities. 

We source funding by telling project leaders' amazing stories and promoting them to networks of people who care, and are willing and able to donate. We make it easy, transparent and rewarding for people to contribute to important global causes, so more people contribute and more people are lifted out of poverty. 

Humanity is elevated by increases in living standards for project beneficiaries and increases in altruism, kindness and compassion for donors, project leaders and everyone involved.

Our problem is global poverty and inequality. The world's richest 1% have more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people. Despite the world's abundance, people living in impoverished communities around the world struggle to access enough nutritious food, clean drinking water, education, or meaningful work that's fairly paid.

The resources to provide every human being with the means to lead safe, self-determined lives exist on this planet, but are being accumulated and held by a tiny minority of people at the top. Effective solutions that are ready to be implemented, simply don't happen because people leading them can't access the funds they need. So people remain hungry, uneducated, unemployed.

At the same time, people who have resources to share have lost trust in the charity sector. Decades of international aid but still growing inequality leaves people questioning where all the money's going. Global problems feel too big, unsolvable and overwhelming. Scandals and corruption in big-name charities further demotivate would-be donors who think their money will be misused, not reach the people in need, or simply not make a difference. 

Therefore, people who need money to solve poverty aren't receiving it, and people who care about poverty aren't donating. 

We break down poverty into tangible chunks and address it at the local level. We partner with project leaders who have viable solutions to their community's specific needs. We then source a donor to fund their project so their community's needs are met.

For example, in Kenya 56% of the population do not have access to clean water, and 80% of all diagnosed diseases are waterborne. Water filters are expensive and most people can't afford them. Just Peoples project leader Beth developed a water filter that is cheap and effective. We promote Beth's story and her solution on our website, and people donate to buy a water filter. We pass on 100% of the funds we raise to Beth who then makes and distributes the water filters to people who need them most. 

Then Beth provides pictures, videos and anecdotes that we share with the donor so they feel connected to the people they've brought clean water to, and they can feel the real impact they've made.  

We support 20 project leaders like Beth in 13 countries across Africa, Asia and Mexico, by funding their work. Their solutions include disability support, clean energy, nutrition, mental healthcare, education, and job creation.

We partner with project leaders in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Burundi, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Mexico. Each community our project leaders work in faces extreme poverty and inequality, whether it's an urban slum or a rural village.

Our project leaders were born and bred in these communities, growing up with the struggles they're now seeking to resolve. Once educated these local heroes returned to their hometowns to implement viable and effective solutions to enable their people to lead better lives. The project leaders know firsthand the local needs and the best way of working with people to ensure lasting change. 

We have regular calls with our project leaders to create projects that we promote on our website to attract donors. We tell their stories in a way that an international audience can grasp the problems, and how their donation can directly enable the solution. Once projects have been implemented we help our project leaders provide engaging and meaningful feedback to their donors to keep them engaged with the community and want to support them more.

We continue working with our project leaders until their projects are self-sustaining and no longer require external funding. 

We build awareness of tangible and innovative solutions to poverty that exist in the world by sharing our project leaders' work in an inspiring way, with audiences they wouldn't be able to reach without us.

We drive action to make these solutions happen by telling people exactly what the problem is and how much is needed to solve it. We ensure donors know where every dollar is going to increase trust and transparency. We then provide direct feedback to donors so they feel connected to the people they support and inspired to contribute again. And we make it all easy.

Just Peoples other co-founder Jo and I (Christey) were both young professionals who really cared about global poverty and were trying to do something about it. We were working with local NGOs across Asia and South America "helping". But as we weren't lawyers or doctors or psychologists, we couldn't actually help with their most pressingeeds. We couldn't speak the local languages and had no idea about all the complexities and intricacies of the context-specific issues these communities were facing. In short, we weren't helping at all. 

But we would go back to New Zealand and Australia and tell the heartbreaking and inspiring stories of people we met and worked with to our friends back home and they would always say "wow I didn't know that was happening, how can I help". At the same time the local heroes we met at each location who had so much passion and talent to solve their community's problems, didn't have the cash to do so. So Jo and I (best friends since kindergarten) set up Just Peoples as a hub to connect grassroots leaders with people who want to fund life-changing projects and make a direct impact on poverty.

We work with people all over the world, both donors and project beneficiaries, so there's no one location or cause that motivates me. The unifying factor is the innate urge that human beings feel - no matter their nationality/race/gender/socio-economic background - to contribute. I got into this work because I want to make a personal contribution to humanity, to somehow leave the world better than I found it. Now I've found a way to do that and a way to help others do that too. My motivation is working with incredible people who share that desire to contribute. The project leaders have sacrificed their own chance of being rich, in order to lift their communities out of poverty. They are endlessly inspiring. At the same time, the project donors and funders are also sacrificing their own wealth and immediate comfort for the benefit of others who they haven't even met. That energy is so powerful and motivating. And the more people get involved, the more this energy spreads, and ultimately, the more people are lifted out of poverty and the better we all are!

I grew up in a working-class, extremely conservative Christian family where my thoughts, words and movements were very strictly controlled. I felt trapped and longed for freedom. I wasn't poor but I was often hungry and missed out on basic opportunities my peers had. While these experiences were not so extreme, they gave me the gift of empathy, particularly for people who feel trapped by circumstances they can't control themselves. 

I've lived and worked in 8 different countries and have learnt to connect with and speak to people of all cultures and backgrounds, on a level that feels natural to them. This enables me to work with project leaders from Uganda to Vietnam and Mexico to design and establish their projects for funding, and to then communicate their projects effectively and inspiringly to donors from big corporations, to students, to family business owners, to get them all involved. 

As one of our project leaders from Kenya said to me recently "we need you to speak to donors for us. If we ask for money directly they don't trust us". My role is the middle person, connecting people and helping them understand each other. Jo, our co-founder, takes care of the business and strategy of Just Peoples. After ten years working for multi-national corporations before switching to non-profit, she's the best placed for that role.

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted our whole funding model. The schools we support were closed, business startups we'd funded were closing, workshops we'd funded were cancelled and so on. Our project leaders had to pivot quickly to meet the emerging and urgent needs of their communities. They were supplying food parcels, handwashing stations for communities without running water, PPE and ventilators for frontline medical staff - and they needed funding immediately.

Usually we would list a project on our website and wait for it to be funded before we transfer the money to our project leader on the ground to implement it. But during Covid-19, if our project leaders had to wait for the money, people would starve, hospitals wouldn't have PPE: people would die.

So we got in touch with our partners to understand their emergency responses and immediately transfered them the funds from our own overheads account. We then set up a general fundraising appeal to all of our network of donors to raise the money fast. We raised over $20,000 and impacted over 12,000 lives. We're now exploring opportunities to make this our usual model, so project leaders can access funding when they need it, without waiting.

In 2013 I moved to Manila to investigate how migrating Filipinos can get trafficked as they migrate. Before I moved from NZ, a friend of a friend said she knew a safe place I could rent in Manila. When I arrived in Manila, I was picked up from the airport and taken to where I had to pay 3 months' rent in advance. I was then dropped off at a wharf where I took a boat across a river to a sprawling slum. Far from the safe accommodation I'd planned for, I was alone in a dangerous area, surrounded by people living in poverty who were curious about the "rich" white woman moving into their neighbourhood. I was terrified. But I decided to give it a go anyway to see if I could make it work. I worked hard to make friends and allies to keep me safe, and I soon felt welcomed by the locals. In the end I learnt so much more about Filipino poverty, migration and trafficking than I ever could have in an office. I made friends for life, and a store owner who needed a new freezer sparked the idea that later became Just Peoples. 

We go against the dated "white saviour" charity model by backing local leaders. We don't assume we can solve a community's issues better than someone who's lived them. 

We're not opaque. We provide direct feedback from the projects to donors. People choose and know exactly where their money is going, which location, which cause, even the final beneficiaries whom they hear directly from.

The projects we support are extremely innovative. Because we believe in our project leaders in their early stages, they're free to test and pilot innovative and cutting edge solutions that more traditional donors would deem too risky. In fact, one of our Bangladeshi entrepreneurs utilised an MIT blueprint to 3D print ventilators during Covid-19. 

If we fund locally designed and developed initiatives to address poverty then they have more chance at being successful and sustainable than initiatives implemented from outside. This is because local people deeply understand the problems their communities face so are the best placed to "diagnose" them. They also have the established relationships necessary to gain buy-in from beneficiaries and implement sustainable change. Local knowledge is utlised and retained in the community, and community members are committed to and spurring on the change.

Since we launched Just Peoples five years ago we've funded 94 projects, impacting the lives of almost 84,000 people. 

As we become increasingly efficient in securing funding for projects we'll be able to scale that impact significantly by delivering more projects and larger projects that impact more people. Next year we believe we can fund 50 projects and reach 100,000 people, and in 5 years time we hope to be funding 200 projects per year, impacting 500,000 people annually.

*Note the number of lives impacted per project varies.

In the next five years we want to impact the lives of 2 million people living in poverty by enabling them to access education, healthcare, clean water and other essential services. 

We plan to do that by getting 50,000 people to join us in the fight against global poverty, by donating to make the life-changing projects we support happen and expand to reach more people.

As our capacity grows we can source and vet more awesome projects in more communities around the world and simultaneously find donors for them.

• We need to begin investing in more skilled staff. We have been largely reliant on volunteers and pro-bono consultants to date which makes it difficult to plan and stick to timeframes, as volunteers have other priorities come up.

• There is currently a lag in the time that partners have to wait while we recruit a donor to fund their project. When funds are needed urgently for a project, or the context changes before it's funded, this can be problematic. We need to be able to respond much faster to our project leaders' financial needs.

• Due to not having a high marketing budget and media strategy expertise we do not have a fast growing donor base. 

• Covid-19 has halted many of our projects as well as our project site / content-collection travel plans. This is likely to be a barrier we'll face over the next 12 months.

• We are planning to invest in more skilled staff in the areas that will help us scale up Just Peoples. Namely, digital marketing, business development and partnerships management.

• We are planning to establish a revolving fund so that we can provide our project leaders with funds quickly where necessary (ie before we have finished fundraising for the project). Covid-19 and natural disasters that have occurred in the communities we work have highlighted the need for this urgency.

• We have recently had a pro bono digital agency develop a digital marketing strategy for Just Peoples. We are now planning to roll this out to grow our supporter base.

• We will plan to travel to key project sites when it is safe to do so.

All our project leaders run locally-registered non-profits and NGOs.

We partner with ygap Australia to source vetted social entrepreneurs who become our project leaders.

We partner with various businesses to help them make their contribution through their business. 

The Asia New Zealand Foundation has provided us with travel grants to visit our project sites, as well as media exposure and other in-kind support.

Several other business have provided us with pro bono support and in-kind donations including legal services, graphic design, digital marketing and coaching.

Facebook gives us US $250 per month to spend on Facebook advertising and Google gives us $10,000 per month through Google Ad Grants.

Our key beneficiaries are our project leaders who design, budget for and implement the projects we fund, and the local communities our project leaders serve. We have a unique business model whereby we advertise our project leaders’ unique projects for funding and guarantee individual donors a completely personalised and transparent experience with the opportunity to choose which project leader and project receives 100% of their donation.

We currently cover our overhead costs through a group of 100 individuals who make monthly donations to our overheads specifically. We also rely on grants and additional one-off donations. Our customers (donors) are inspired to donate through us because they are guaranteed to know where their money is going.

We have a diversified donor base and deliver impact through contributions from a combination of private donations, small business donations, corporate donations and grants. We are highly transparent and communicate to each of our donors exactly where their money is going and what percentage is going to overheads. We currently have a group of 100 individuals, our “Champions” who make monthly donations to cover our overhead costs, and we're looking to launch a “Business Champions” program in the second half of 2020. We are also exploring a number of other opportunities including using our expertise and networks to consult with corporate partners to support them to source and vet projects that closely align with their CSR goals. We will charge for this service and contribute this revenue to cover additional overhead costs.

• Individual donors and small businesses have provided donations of around 80,000USD in the last 12 months
• Linkedin provided us with a $10,000USD grant
• The Asia New Zealand Foundation provided us with a grant of around $1,000USD

We are seeking grant funding of US $300,000 over the next two years so that we can comfortably cover our overhead expenses and invest in the expertise (primarily business development and financial) and marketing budgets required to scale our organisation to reach our goal of impacting the lives of 500,000 people living in poverty per annum and work towards financial sustainability.

2020

Staff

$54,600

Travel (Partnership Management and Content Collection)

$10,000

Marketing and Media Budget

$10,000

Other Costs (Website, legal, software etc)

$10,000

$84,600

There are three key opportunities that have excited us to apply for the Elevate Prize: 

1. The tailored marketing and media campaign and opportunity for networking and connections will be of huge benefit to us. We have spent the last 5 years building strong partnerships with our project leaders and a solid platform to enable people around the world to support their vital work and are now ready to shout about it from the rooftops and SCALE! 

2. We’d like to invest the cash prize into paid staff expertise and time required to scale Just Peoples, as well as a marketing budget so more people can learn about Just Peoples. We'd also set up a revolving fund to ensure we can meet our project leaders' urgent needs as they arise.

3. Mentorship Opportunities - we have a strong learning culture and global mindset at Just Peoples and jump at opportunities to upskill ourselves and learn how we can improve. 

As Just Peoples is now ready to scale, we recognise that the team and founders simultaneously need to upskill and build our own capacity in order to adapt to the changes that scale brings to an organisation. As such mentoring, coaching and strong board members and advisors will be key to helping us grow and adapt in the ways we need to.

Extra funding will enable us to invest the time and resources needed for us to reach our goals, and marketing and media will provide us with the exposure we need to reach the people who will help us make it happen (new project donors).