In the early hours of the morning, Alex Jiang ’15 and Greg Hosono ’14 trudged two miles in the bitter wind to reach Andover High School as part of a search for viable student-run ventures. While they did not find any suitable projects there, they journeyed to many schools across the country in order to find student-led ventures for their first round of fundraising with their organization [Sponsr.Us](http://sponsr.us).
The non-profit, a social fundraising platform and mentorship network for student-driven initiatives, launched on Wednesday after more than two years of development.
Sponsr.Us was able to raise over $400 for three student driven projects on science education, bullying and music education. These students were chosen by the Sponsr.Us team after analyses of their projects, project goals and teamwork ability. Sponsr.Us expects to take on two more fundraising projects this year.
Sponsr.Us was founded by Eric Ouyang ’13 in the summer of 2011, and now has four other directors: Kevin Song ’11, Hosono, Jiang and Brandon Wang PEA ’14.
“The idea is that students all over the country have really good ideas, but they don’t have access to the funding or the mentorship that they need to make their idea reach fruition,” said Hosono. “So we are hoping to give them access to a way to raise money, and also the mentorship to help make their ideas a reality.”
Ouyang began Sponsr.Us in 2011 to give students outside of Andover an opportunity comparable to the Abbot grants offered to Andover students. Seeing the success of crowd-funding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo reinforced his belief that a student-catered platform could be successful.
Unlike Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which only provide funds to their projects, Ouyang and his team incorporated a mentorship program into Sponsr.Us.
“Just having the money is not enough for a student project to be successful. As we discussed how we wanted to develop Sponsr.Us, we realized we really needed to build a mentorship component,” said Ouyang. All student ventures on Sponsr.Us are paired with volunteer student and adult mentors who help guide their project to completion.
The Sponsr.Us team ran into numerous challenges throughout their two and a half years working on the project.
“I think the largest difficulty that we ran into was trying to receive our 501(c)(3) tax exempt status from the IRS. We were lucky that we have a couple of lawyers working pro bono for us, who helped us through that process. It ended up taking a lot longer, and ended up being a lot more of a headache than we had expected,” said Ouyang.
They also faced a more predictable problem: their enrollment at rigorous boarding schools. Schoolwork and extracurricular activities often made it difficult to work on the initiative, putting off most development to the summers.
The fundraising began on Wednesday, January 15, and will end on Saturday, February 15.
“We are looking to get a donation from anyone. Using the Internet, you can raise money from lots and lots of people. You don’t need to get a lot of money from each person, you can raise $1, $2 or $5 from lots of people, and that’s how you reach your funding goal,” said Hosono.
Ouyang concluded, “The project just has to have a lot of energy. So we are looking for students who have a really strong passion for what they are trying to start… In terms of criteria, also it’s very much how we see ourselves working with them, so we want people that we think we can mesh with.”
