How did you and the For a Day Foundation get involved with ‘crypto’ giving?

We got involved because of a board member’s connection to Angel Protocol.

So far, the generosity has blown my mind.

The board thought it would be a passive way to bring in some extra cash and we were proud to say we now had an endowment — none of us are personally involved in crypto — but then the really large donations came in unexpectedly!

So I promoted a need on Twitter for donors to support a large request from two families: tickets to Universal Studios for an “escape from the hospital for a day.”

And by the end of the day, we had a donor generously covering the entire request.

It was wild! And now we’re even more excited to connect with the compassion of the crypto community.

Had you ever used endowments before or ever thought of using them? 

Never used an endowment before! I genuinely thought it was out of reach for us, considering our annual budget had never topped $100K.

I’m really excited to start including this on our grant proposals, to see if it will entice more private foundations to invest in us, knowing we’re small but we have an endowment fund.

How has Angel Protocol experience been so far? What have you been able to do? 

I personally like to check our Angel Protocol balance weekly. I like to see the numbers grow. When donations are slow or there’s not much movement, it’s easy to feel like you have zero momentum. Looking at the endowment growth week by week gives me a little spark of inspiration.

With our current endowment balance and the projected yield, we expect our administrative expenses to be covered. The yield is currently one of our largest contributors to date.

How do you think Angel Protocol will be able to benefit your charity in the future?

The network of Angel Protocol’s audience seems to be incredibly responsive to crypto’s empowerment and in addition to building the endowment, we hope to continue tapping into that responsiveness for requests to support families and kids.

While we prefer to have funds sitting in our accounts waiting to be used, we know that people tend to respond to specific asks and that we need requests from families to bring to the community to fulfil ASAP.

We’re very excited at including the crypto community to quickly fulfil family wishes.

Advice for others

Jump on in!

Learning about crypto is truly hands on — but at the end of the day, it’s all about connecting with generous people who just want to make a difference.

Do you have any immediate needs? Or immediate plans for using the funding?

We’re in a precarious balance of not knowing if we have enough cash to answer the potential for demand.

Over 14,000 NEW children will be diagnosed with cancer EACH YEAR — this doesn’t account for the kids whose treatment spans multiple years and the families with children in remission but still dealing with side effects.

Knowing that we could be overwhelmed with demand, we’ve mitigated our marketing efforts to ensure we can fulfill every request.

The last thing we want to happen is to tell a family ‘no’ because we don’t have the funding — or worse, we prolong fulfilling their request looking for the funds and the child passes away. So, the more funding we have, the bolder we can be in pursuing referrals and connections.

Now that we’ve achieved our first goal with the endowment (using the yield to satisfy our administrative operations), we’ll then work towards covering our single part-time salaried employee — the program director — who manages family requests, connects volunteers, manages projects and ensures all requests are met.