Synpact
I started Synpact because I wanted to put a real dent in how much suffering there is in the world, and the system we count on for that, charitable giving, could work far better than it does. The clearest thing to come out of it: Give & Game, a charity festival I created and produced solo, raising $20,000+ for five Boston nonprofits.
The more I looked, the more one gap kept showing up: so much of giving runs on obligation. You donate, often out of pressure, feel vaguely good for a minute, never see where the money went, and nothing invites you back. The whole experience is designed around the transaction instead of the person. So I built Synpact on three fixes: make the impact visible, make the act of giving actually enjoyable, and give people real incentives to keep doing it. I tested a blockchain build, ran the model past more than a hundred charities and donors across every giving tier, and cut the blockchain piece when it became clear it didn't move the thing that actually matters: getting more people to give. The idea held, so I set out to prove it in the real world.
Give & Game was the mission made physical, and the concept was mine from scratch: take everything people love about a game day, teams, colors, rivalry, a prize, and point all of it at charity. A full carnival festival where five Boston nonprofits become five teams. You pick the cause you care about most, put on its color, and spend the day competing for it. Every game played and every dollar donated scores points for your team, and the winning team's nonprofit takes the grand prize. I brought Babson's president and a billionaire sponsor on as backers, and as a senior I took it from concept to reality end to end: recruiting the five nonprofits, filling the field with 50+ tables hosted by student clubs and organizations, lining up food vendors and live music, designing the team competitions, building the point-tracking system behind them, and running day-of operations for more than 350 people. And while it happened on Babson's campus, none of it was handed to me: I bootstrapped it and pushed it through every obstacle in the way, including the event getting cancelled twice before it ever happened. It raised over $20,000, all of it going to mental health, pediatric cancer, food insecurity, climate, and animal welfare.
Before the festival and before the blockchain model, Synpact's first form was content. I led a small production team making videos with real causes at the center: homeless shelters, veterans' organizations, children's illness foundations, endangered-animal sanctuaries, environmental exhibits, and spontaneous acts of giving along the way. I directed the productions end to end, shooting and editing alongside the team. The model was to make the cause itself the entertainment: film the work up close, show exactly where the money goes, spread awareness for causes that rarely get an audience, and pull viewers into the process so they feel like part of the operation. The idea was that, at scale, the viewers are what make the change possible. Charity as content people want to watch, participate in, and point to as something they helped make happen.
Once Give & Game was over, I was honest with myself: I loved Synpact's idea and what it could become, but the day-to-day of running a philanthropy operation wasn't what I expected or wanted, and it wasn't where my best work would come from. So I wound it down. The instinct underneath it, making people feel something through media and building a brand around what matters, became Connected.