Giving Money is The New Making Money

How Emmett Shine and Give One want to make giving back easy

We’re back with another Member Spotlight, because our members are always up to something awesome!

This week, we were lucky enough to get an invite to the launch party for Give One, a new platform connecting people with the causes they care about, whether to donate their money, or their time.

We caught up with Emmett Shine, founder of Gin Lane Media and Give One, the day after the launch to talk a little bit more about how he and his team came to create Give One.

Check out our conversation below:

Tell us a little about your background

I’m from Southampton on Long Island, my mom is a painter, dad is a landscaper, so from that I have a sort of artistic side, and a yeomen’s labor get shit done with your hands auto-didactic side.

I went to NYU for photography and dropped out senior year to work full-time; throughout college I was doing a lot of photography, web design, and art design, and applying them in an entrepreneurial capacity. My friends and I started LOLA New York, a T-shirt, skateboarding collective. We’d come up with these designs, photograph them, built the website, handled packing and distribution; we were doing this full-time. Then on the other side, I was also doing photo shoots for people, designing websites for friends in the artistic community. Business started taking off and at that time I decided it’d be better to do that than continue school.

It got to a point where I was getting frustrated over not getting paid on time, billing people through my personal name, so I came up with the idea that if I said I worked for a company, people would pay me accordingly, so I came up with the name Gin Lane Media. I had a friend act as a partner, calling people up and asking for payment, and it worked. We had to incorporate to cash the checks, and since I’ve been “stuck” with it. I like making it more about the collective than the individual. We’re a legit company now, with almost three dozen employees. It’s nice to have these people feel part of this community.

So how did you guys come up with the idea behind Give One?

LOLA New York and some of our other friends have always done charitable activations, but more on the street level — a personal care for the community. We’d be able to get people together, friends of ours in nightlife and hospitality, together for benefits.

When Hurricane Sandy hit, we did this thing called Rockaway Relief, with basically the same team for Give One. We started bussing people out there in vans to raise money, provide people with blood, shovels, tools needed to start rebuilding. We did this before the Coast Guard could get out there; we were on the ground and it was amazing getting involved on a local level.

So when the election happened, us liberals who voted, who got out to raise the vote, who donated, the day after a lot of us thought “Man, I probably could have done more.” A lot of us had tweeted to the “echo chamber”, but it hadn’t been enough.

We remembered Rockaway Relief, how we were able to organize people together, touch people, touch communities, and I also remembered a project called Dollar a Day, started by the founder of Kickstarter [Perry Chen]. He’d built this platform through which you could donate to various causes in small amounts and kept the code open, so we dusted it off and that’s what became Give One.

Which is why you’re keeping the code open source for other developers?

Exactly. It’s a base informing how we want to go about Give One. We want the development community to contribute to the technology product, to suggest uses additional to what we launched with. It’s really a V1 beta, just to get out there and prove the model.

We want to make it more of an API that you can use as a tool, like Kickstarter or Paypal, as a technology platform for choosing a cause and giving microdonations. We’re speaking to properties who’d be willing to embed Give One in to their platforms and direct donations from their readers willing to support specific causes, pertinent to the topics the articles are on.

And so how do you determine which organizations to work with?

We’re more on a national and local level on the donations side. On the volunteer front, they’re all locally-based. Nationwide, we’re working with the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Environmental Defense Fund, etc. On the local volunteer level, we’ve started with organizations like KEEN and The Trevor Project. All downtown New York non-profit organizations that we’ve done different work with over the past few years that could really use the help.

We also made it so all the volunteer opportunities are on weekends, It’s like a starter kit for activism and volunteering. So many of us who are post-college, in pre-defined adulthood, live in cities, we all have the same feeling of restlessness. So we wanted to make giving back as frictionless as possible, like Gin Lane would do for the startups we work with.

Where do you plan on expanding?

We’re excited to get out to other platforms, get it out to more people, get the code worked on by developers. The goal locally is to expand to three other neighborhoods by the end of the year.

Thanks for speaking with us Emmett.

That’s it for this week’s Member Spotlight. Make sure you sign yourself up for Give One and start making this world a little bit better, if not with your money, then with your time — volunteer for one of the amazing opportunities coming up.