We love the Debt Collective. They're doing essential political organizing — pressuring Congress, the Department of Education, and lenders to cancel debt at scale. Their work has helped cancel nearly $200 billion in loans. Go support them too. But political wins take years, and millions of people are drowning right now. We're a mutual aid pool, not a movement. We pay off real debt this month, with real money, for one real person. Different lane, same fight.
Honestly? Low at first, and we won't pretend otherwise. With 100 members in the drawing, you've got a 1-in-100 shot at the first drawing. As we grow, individual odds go down — but the number of payoffs per year goes up. Most members will never win. Most will still tell you it was worth joining, because someone they'll never meet got their life back, and that someone could just as easily have been them.
Nowhere — and that's the point. We never hold money. Here's the exact sequence: we draw a name → we set up a GoFundMe that names that person as the beneficiary → we blast it to our entire community → GoFundMe collects the donations and pays them directly to the person drawn → they pay their loan servicer within 7 days and send us the confirmation → we post the receipt publicly. The money goes from your card to GoFundMe to the person drawn to their lender. It never passes through our hands. If it isn't used for their loan, you can ask GoFundMe for a refund under its Giving Guarantee. GoFundMe does charge a platform fee (currently around 2.9% + $0.30 per donation), which is unavoidable — but that's it.
No. We don't collect money, so there's nothing to skim. GoFundMe charges their standard processing fee on each donation (around 2.9% + $0.30) — that goes to them, not us. Our only costs are the website hosting and the email platform, which we cover ourselves. If that ever changes, we'll say so publicly before it does.
Donations to an individual through crowdfunding are generally treated as personal gifts, not income to the person receiving them. Large donations can have gift-tax reporting rules for the donor. Every situation is different, so we tell each person drawn to check with a tax professional, and we'll be upfront about anything we learn.
Yes, and we need you. Members in the drawing are eligible to win. Allies donate when each GoFundMe goes live. Both roles matter. If you've already paid off your loans — or never had them — you can follow us, share each fundraiser, and donate when a drive opens. Every dollar goes to someone who's still buried.
The GoFundMe runs for a set period and whatever gets raised goes to the winner, who puts all of it toward their loan. If someone has $200,000 in loans and the drive raises $8,000, $8,000 goes to their servicer and we roll them back into the drawing for future rounds. A meaningful dent is better than nothing, and they stay eligible until they're paid off.
Tom O. started this after realizing he'd skip a coffee a month to pay off a stranger's student loan debt — and figured others might feel the same way. Read the full story →