Digital mutual aid isn’t the solution

Sometimes you need some extra help to pay the bills. With wages decreasing and the cost of living going up, this truth becomes even more evident.

That’s exactly why, in 2010, entrepreneurs Andrew Ballester and Brad Damphousse founded GoFundMe. The pair wanted to create a donation-based website that wasn’t focused on the needs of startups or existing businesses, but on the needs of individuals. The site boasts a striking figure of $30 billion raised over the last decade and a half, with a digital donation being made every second. GoFundMe has become wildly popular, and for good reason: It has made tangible, life-changing contributions to the lives of millions.

This culture — one of voluntary charity and community storytelling — operates as a kind of mutual aid network. This model has existed for centuries, wherein individuals pool together their own resources — money, food, clothing and the like — for the welfare and stability of their community. Mutual aid operates as a nongovernmental means of distribution: No public agencies and no politicians involved, just the charity of people. Donors on GoFundMe and the like aren’t motivated by selfishness or acclaim, just compassion.

This doesn’t mean, however, that crowdfunding is without its faults. Though this method of individual fundraising has become the norm, relying on the contributions of strangers isn’t a lasting solution to financial distress. The philanthropic quality of GoFundMe, while initially beneficial, distracts from systemic wealth inequality and gives the government responsible for it an out. Not to mention, the site’s composition leaves much to be desired regarding transparency. On the surface, GoFundMe appears to be an acceptable solution, but it is intrinsically flawed.

Despite its feel-good interface, the site hides some of its objectives. While there is no fee to create a fundraiser, there are costs to making donations. There is a transaction fee of nearly 3% plus an additional 30 cents per donation. While this number seems small, it adds up. Just this month, one donor attempted to give $500 to a victim of the Los Angeles wildfires, but was charged $95 by the website. When you have lost everything, every penny counts, and GoFundMe subtracting from contributions can disrupt the financial healing of a loved one. While the site can’t do away with the fee entirely, it ought to decrease the percentage taken per donation to ensure that most of the donation goes to the solicitor, not GoFundMe itself.

Additionally, the algorithm of GoFundMe is flawed. The site promotes the most successful cases to the top of its homepage, leaving the less popular requests hidden among thousands of other hopefuls. Some of these people need life-saving medical care, emergency housing stipends or assistance in paying student loans, but no one can see their solicitations given the nature of the platform. 

Against its best intentions, GoFundMe isn’t sufficiently addressing wealth inequality in the United States. Not all people have access to computer technology or broadband internet, thus limiting their ability to create their own online fundraisers in the first place. This allows wealthier individuals to make more requests, some of which are meaningless and distracting. White people and men also prove to be more successful in crowdfunding, further contributing to a socioeconomic divide along racial and gendered lines. For a site that is meant to be helpful for marginalized communities, it doesn’t seem that they’ve been all that successful.

Crafting a compelling narrative is also key to gaining donations, but sometimes that isn’t possible. Hundreds of people on GoFundMe need, for example, money to pay for medical treatments, but how can you creatively ask for help paying for chemotherapy? Asking people to tell stories to elicit sympathy for their cause is a symptom of the society that made GoFundMe so popular: universal, public programs just aren’t doing the job anymore.

The social safety net offered by the United States government has become weaker over the years. Benefits including food stamps, support for low-income families and housing subsidies no longer provide the same degree of support they once did. In lieu of lacking government action, it has been private companies like GoFundMe that have stepped up to take care of people in times of crisis. During the Black Lives Matter protests in the early 2020s and COVID-19, it was crowdfunding sites that provided the most immediate support.

But we can’t rely on digital mutual aid as a permanent solution. This intricate, personal web of connections doesn’t solve the systemic issues of poverty and injustice, but rather puts a bandaid on a gaping wound. The issues that people request aid for on GoFundMe — paying their college tuition, receiving gender-affirming surgery, finding money for groceries — could more uniformly be financed by federal or local governments. Private charity doesn’t have the capability to replace public government agencies, and we shouldn’t let it.

Of course, sometimes a GoFundMe fundraiser and a dream is all you have. The new presidential administration makes this even more of a reality, with social safety nets under grievous threat. When fundraisers become more popular, so does the issue that accompanies them. Social media has allowed these pages to spread even more easily, building strong communities with shared interests and needs. However, the site’s algorithm promotes competition among solicitors, and the actual act of requesting money — especially from strangers — can be embarrassing and even tiring. Whether we like it or not, sometimes the easy fix is not the best one.

In the meantime, GoFundMe provides the solace that Americans will need to deal with rising costs and financial insecurity. But, in the long run, we can’t rely on digital mutual aid and crowdfunding as a sustainable solution. GoFundMe can’t and shouldn’t fill in the gaps of our social safety nets: That’s the job of the government. As public agencies step back, it is private individuals who are being tasked with aiding their fellow citizens. The inconsistency of our elected officials in answering their constituents’ requests is putting even more pressure on these online spaces and the people that inhabit them.

It would be unsustainable to request that the U.S. government pay off individual car loans, supply one family with money for a loved one’s funeral or buy one college student their textbooks. However, it is possible for the government to address the overarching problems that contribute to these cases. Federal and local agencies ought to see this rapid increase in crowdfunding attempts as a testament to their own inaction, and take special care to notice those fundraisers that are unsuccessful. People are begging for help, and their fellow Americans are running out of resources to give to them.

GoFundMe and its counterparts are here to stay, but it’s high time that the government added itself to the mix of benefactors. While mutual aid has gotten us far, it hasn’t brought us far enough. So, you can keep donating to the charity of your choice, but remember that we ought to not be alone in these desperate times: It’s the onus of the government to fund us.

Lindsey Spencer is an Opinion Columnist whose column “The American Cynic” talks politics, power and people. She can be reached at lindssp@umich.edu, but only if you’re nice.

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