On August 5th, 549 cafes, 42 coffee roasters and sponsors, and thousands of coffee drinkers took part in CafeSmart 2016 and helped raise $160,523 to fund local grassroots homeless projects. For every coffee sold, cafes donated $1, coffee roasters supplied beans and customers chipped in. An amazing effort and a record year.
100% of these funds have now been combined with substantial funds raised through our new StreetSmart Collective initiative and other one off gifts for a total of $223,000 distributed to support 118 community grants.
The smiles of the WIPAN team show just what it means to receive a StreetSmart grant.
ate 2014, after 18 months works, we launched our own crowdfunding platform, StreetSmart Projects. The concept was simple – to empower smaller grassroots homeless services to engage and connect with the StreetSmart supporter community to crowdfund important projects in the community. The pilot platform ran for 12 months raising over $35,000 for 10 projects. Organisations such as Dandelion Support Network, The Footpath Library, Safe Futures and Emerge Womens and Childrens Network all successfully used the platform and each of the 10 projects reached its funding goal. In a number of cases we raised considerably more than the $ target through donations direct to the organisation, in kind support and additional support.
