Community Funded: A New Avenue for Local Collaboration and Project Funding

By Charlie Englar
Local business man McCabe Callahan, who currently owns the pair of Mugs Coffee Lounge restaurants in Fort Collins, is in the process of putting together a very unique and one-of-a-kind website. The goal of said website? Generating funding for any type of project one may come up with.
Callahan, A CSU graduate, is teaming up with other CSU graduates and local business owners to launch CommunityFunded.com. The direct idea of the site is to connect individuals, business, non-profits and the like with the community and its resources. A project or idea may be posted on CommunityFunded.com, and then anyone and everyone is free to donate or pledge money to as many or few as they please, for as little or as much as they would like.
This form of connection and platform use is a remarkably new and fresh idea, and it will have its roots right here in Fort Collins.

As co-founder, Callahan says there are some ambitious goals for the site within its first year of launch.
Callahan and the other founders would love to see the site be responsible for one billion dollars raised in the first year. Although this may seem like a gaudy number, when broken down, it looks a bit more reasonable. According to Callahan, if a person pledges ten dollars, and then tells two other people to do the same, and they in turn tell two more people to pledge and so forth, in 27 days 100,000,000 people will have pledged one billion dollars.
Callahan does admit that this type of exponential growth has never been seen by any site, but, no-matter. Along with this never before reached goal, McCabe has applied to the Guinness Book Of World Records for the “Fastest Billion Dollars Raised for Community Projects.”
Another aspect that makes CommunityFunded.com so robust and true to its own form is the complete lack of capitalization for the founders. It is a site truly dedicated to the “idea > community/funding” equation. All the founders, including Callahan, continue to work diligently at running their businesses and doing their day jobs, while also putting in the hours to get the site up and running.
The idea of this mass community participation is something that Callahan hopes will really resonate with people, who will in turn help to build and create a beautiful thing. A thing that, someday, may be able to run and breathe on its own solely because of the multi-headed participation from the community.
As of press time, CommunityFunded.com is in pre-launch/sneak-peek status, with more additions to the site on the way. Visit communityfunded.com for more.