On a frosty night in November, Dublin-based Deliveroo driver Caio Benicio was on his way to collect an order when he was shocked to spot a knife attack across the street. While others might have fled from the scene, the Brazilian rushed towards the danger, using his helmet as a weapon to stop the attacker.
Benicio quickly became a local hero and the father of two was showered with praise across Irish media, with celebrities to politicians rushing to congratulate him for his bravery. In years gone by, that might have been the end of the story, but for Benicio there was an unexpected twist.
A fellow Dubliner, Paul Darcy, decided that notes of thanks were not enough to mark Benicio’s heroism. Darcy launched a GoFundMe page, entitled ‘Buy Caio Benicio a pint’ and urged locals to donate the cost of a Guinness. And they did—in their thousands.
The campaign exploded on social media, and before long, the page had racked up more than a third of a million euros in donations. Benicio’s life had been transformed – a man who barely earned minimum wage was suddenly sitting on a huge pile of cash.
His experience is just one of a plethora of weird and wonderful campaigns that have popped up on GoFundMe since its launch in 2010, during which time the firm has raised tens of billions of pounds in donations – including more than £1 billion in the UK alone.
Ireland consistently tops the list for the most generous nation per capita to use the site, while the UK is not far behind in third place, with one donation every second.
“We’ve had kids who really wanted to go to their high school prom in a tank so raised about $1200” GoFundMe's British CEO Tim Cadogan told the Standard.
“And we’ve had lots of community garden projects, turning rough pieces of land into a beautiful garden where people can come together and grow fruit, grow flowers and hold events.”
Several scandalous GoFundMe applications have also popped up over the years. In January, a woman was sentenced to three years in prison in New Jersey in connection with a misleading GoFundMe scheme based on a fabricated story involving a homeless man that raised more than $400,000, while in October, a female TikToker admitted faking a cancer diagnosis after raising $37,000 on the site.
Cadogan said these cases were “very rare” and that the firm employs an “expert team” to track anomalous behaviours on the site, but added “human nature is what it is.”
But amid all the curious projects that the site has become used for over the pas decade, it has perhaps become best-known for one thing: helping those in desperate need.
Thousands of people have turned to using the site to raise cash when they have exhausted all other options, ranging from the parents of a child with cancer in search of funding for a treatment that wasn’t available on the NHS, to a student at Oxford University hoping to buy a van to live in when she couldn’t afford to pay rent. Cadogan says there has also been a surge in fundraising for people facing severe cost-of-living pressures.
These heart-wrenching cases, many of which raise thousands of pounds, raise moral questions about the deep societal role that GoFundMe – which is after all a for-profit private company (with a charitable arm) -- plays across the world.
One the one hand, it is unquestionable that many lives have been saved with the support that millions have given over the years – something for which the company’s founders, and its bosses, deserve great credit.
On the other, there is something unsettling about a firm whose business model would appear to depend on the existence of other people’s plight -- it takes a small cut from most funds raised.
Wherever you land on the moral debate though, GoFundMe also plays a role in shining a spotlight on the gaps that existing in the welfare state and the wider troubles that subsist in society. Would we know quite how desperate many people in our country are if it were not for this platform? Statistical data may bear this out but does not capture the acuity of these troubles as vivid stories on this platform do. And, says Cadogan, there is also meaning in bringing people together.
“Many people who give know the person but a good number of campaigns break out beyond those immediate networks to people in the community,” he said.
“And it’s the story that resonates with them – they care directly about the person or the issue, and they feel a sense of emotional connection.
“If you talk to any of our customers who have organised a campaign they will of course be appreciative of the money but they also say how much the organisation meant to them, that all these people, many of whom they don’t know, stepped up.”
