Our
Mission
Providing better support to the social, and environmental causes that impact us all, while supporting the higher education of a generation of altruistic individuals ready to pay it forward.
The CandidWorks Mission
Providing better support to the social, and environmental causes that impact us all, while supporting the higher education of a generation of altruistic individuals ready to pay it forward.
At CandidWorks, our mission is to inspire action among those who are passionate about social and environmental improvement, while reducing national student loan debt at the same time. To accomplish this, we’ve created a way for benefactors to connect with like-minded students and graduates, and donate to their student loan debt in exchange for their commitment to volunteer for a social or environmental cause of similar interest. For volunteers, this means the financial freedom to break away from student loan debt and contribute more time back into the community, all while gaining real-world experience in the social and environmental sectors that matter most. For benefactors, this means making your donations go twice as far by helping support both an individual’s education and the causes you care about, all while creating a new generation of philanthropic individuals ready to pay it forward! In essence, doubling the altruistic value of the American dollar by helping the same charitable causes you care about while reducing national student loan debt at the same time!
Why It
Matters
At $1.6 trillion and growing, national student loan debt is the second highest debt group in existence today. Impacting 44 million Americans, and trailing only our total US mortgage debt, it would take an astronomical amount of funds, or a new way of processing student loan debt to alleviate the burden it places on our nation’s young adults and families. While nearly a quarter million students abandon the idea of higher education each year, an estimated $410 billion are contributed to charities annually. That’s a large enough sum to not only reverse the estimated $45 billion growth in our student loan debt each year, but also begin to reduce the impact it has on our indebted and the economy.
As young adults, we're passionate about supporting the same social and environmental causes that our current charities and non-profits are; however, the pressure of student loan debt often makes it difficult to find the means to support them financially or physically. Contributing funds could mean going further into debt, and volunteering could mean taking time away from our secondary jobs, or extra efforts trying to make our next step in life. We also can’t just start asking people to start making charitable donations to us. That would divert money away from other good causes that we care about. What we would be willing to do; however, is contribute significantly more time volunteering for the social and environmental causes we care about if we weren’t so burdened by our debt.
With this dynamic in mind, we created CandidWorks as a way to bridge the gap between higher education, and the ability to provide social and environmental service. By supporting a student or graduate, you can not only help the same social and environmental causes you care about, but also make your contributions go twice as far by helping support the higher education of a skilled volunteer at the same time! Donations made through CandidWorks go directly to a volunteer with student loan debt, and reduce the overhead of the traditional charity model by 36.9% - all while providing greater transparency, and a more direct connection to the charitable causes you care about! To learn more about how we got started and the history of CandidWorks, visit Our Story page!
How It Works
Double the value of your dollar while seeing it put to action
At a fraction of the cost of the traditional charity, CandidWorks enables students, graduates, and benefactors to give back to their communities, all while becoming more directly involved in the causes they care about.
Using CandidWorks is Easy and Free - with no sign-up fees! By creating a profile, students and graduates can post their skills, background, and interest in volunteering, and crowd-source funding to their student debt in exchange for their commitment to provide volunteer service to the social and environmental matters that impact us all. In addition, volunteer organizers can create profiles that inform others of their areas of need, and better source skilled, and empathetic support through the volunteerism of students and graduates!
By operating as a peer to peer [P2P] network, CandidWorks not only directly connects individuals with the causes they care about, but also drastically reduces the costs that are wasted in administrative over-head through the traditional charity model. Using the P2P model, CandidWorks is able to reduce the average overhead costs of the traditional charity from 36.9% to only 5%! Lower overhead means more of your contributions get put into action, all while going twice as far!
In addition to doubling the distance of your contributions, CandidWorks provides greater control, and transparency for the spending of your donations. When beginning and ending a volunteer project, users validate their work by ‘checking-in’ with a brief video showing their work, and provide photo and video updates along the way! This enables benefactors to see the impact made by their contributions in real time, and builds lasting relationships with those they support!
100% Transparency and how you can Make An Impact
There's no magic number that can define the value on what you give, but we created a brief outline of what could be accomplished with only minimal contributions.
Contributions are made on a P2P basis, but, to create a starting point for benefactors and volunteers to assess what may be a reasonable ask, we combined several aspects of the current charity model to create a Suggested Contribution Value that may best benefit all involved parties. To do this, we started by combining the IRS’s value of one hour of volunteer time [currently assessed at $25.43 per hour], with the average 36.9% of contributions that are lost to overhead through the traditional Charity model, and arrived at a Suggested Contribution Value of $34.81 per hour.
Utilizing a 5% overhead model for operational costs, this value can enable the average individual with existing student loan debt to reduce their monthly payment of $280 to only $15.42 by providing 2 hours of service to a charitable cause each week – or a total of 8 hours each month – all while reducing the overhead costs of the traditional charity model by 31.9%. In addition, by contributing 2 hours of volunteer service each week over the average 4-years spent in higher education, this not only alleviates 33% of their educational expenses incurred before graduation, but also reduces the duration of their loan repayment by 9 years without any additional out-of-pocket funding through the reduction of interest accrued throughout the course of their loan deferment.
Get Started
Become a partner in supporting the social, environmental, and educational causes you care about, and start seeing the benefits today!
Signing-up, and getting started is free and easy! Simply create an account to begin volunteering, or visit our campaigns page to begin a pledge! If you are part of a charity / non-profit that could use support - a commercial venture looking to give back – or even have a bright new idea for service, please contact us at Candidworksllc@gmail.com! As a start-up venture focused on social and environmental impact, we're constantly looking for your feedback, and look forward to hearing from you. As always, we wish you and all those you impact the best in all your endeavors!