Teenage Humanitarian Needs Your Help

Akbar Khan, the teenage founder of Bags to Riches, an organization that collects conference bags and distributes them to those in need, is raising money on Indiegogo. Recently, I caught up with Akbar to learn more about the effort; here’s what he told me:

What is the social benefit you hope to achieve with or through your crowdfunding campaign?

You know those old conference bags you have sitting around at your house? We collect those and give them to underprivileged schoolchildren around the world.

Thousands of conferences happen every year where attendees receive quality conference bags that typically go unused after events. At the same time, many schoolchildren don’t have a quality bag to hold their stuff in. Bags to Riches bridges the gap between these problems.

How much money are you hoping to raise and why? How much have you raised so far?

Shipping is rather expensive and a lack of funds is the only thing keeping us from scaling up. Bags to Riches has the potential to prevent hundreds of thousands of bags from being wasted. And in doing so, we would promote the educational goals of kids around the globe. We launched our Campaign on March 10, 2015 and have raised $500 of our $5000 goal within 24 hours.

Whom are you trying to help with your project and why?

Our partnerships with event centers and conferences allow us to set up donation boxes at events, where attendees have the option to donate their bags. We also offer a pickup program for conferences that have excess bags. We donate the collected bags to the developing world through our parter charities. To date, 14,000 bags have been donated to schoolchildren across the world—from Peru to Gambia to Salt Lake City.Everyone! This book will serve as a kind of Chicken Soup for the Soul for anyone who needs or wants inspiration in their lives.

2015 Bags to Riches Video from Akbar Khan on Vimeo.

Check out the campaign:

Visit the website.

Follow on Facebook.

Follow on Twitter at @Bags_to_Riches

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