On Wednesday, PledgeMe announced its first transparent crowdlending campaign, run by New Zealand social enterprise, Eat My Lunch, met its minimum goal of $500,000. The initiative is running through PledgeMe’s new P2P lending platform, PledgeMe.Lend.
Earlier this spring, co-founder and CEO of PledgeMe, Anna Guenther, announced PledgeMe has received approved by the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) to launch its very own P2P lending platform. The website will reportedly allow companies and organizations to run transparent initiatives to crowdsource lending from not only their existing crowd but also the wider market.
Eat My Lunch previously revealed in a press release it will be issuing its very own Lunch Bonds, an innovative offer that provides a financial return to their crowd and gives more lunches to Kiwi kids. The funds will be used to launch the organization in Wellington. The minimum investment in the Lunch Bonds is $1,000, and lenders will be able to choose between two combinations of interest rate and giving. Each of the bonds will have a 5-year term. In the last year, over 200,000 lunches have been gifted to children in need, often more than 1,000 a day across 33 schools in Auckland and Hamilton.
“Eat My Lunch was conceived in response to big social issues happening right here in our own backyard. With 29% of Kiwi kids living in poverty and thousands going to school everyday without food, we decided to use our corporate experience to do something that really mattered. We believe that clever business solutions can help solve social issues, so we created an innovative business model that intrinsically links a social objective into the heart of a for-profit business. The model is sustainable, scalable and enables Kiwis to help other Kiwis.”
Eat My Lunch founder Lisa King stated:
“Our crowd has come on board to help support our growth, ensuring we can launch in Wellington in term three and improve our underlying technology. If we raise our maximum goal of $1,000,000 there’s more work we can do to scale into new cities and towns.”
She continued:
“The ‘Lunch Bond’ is a Kiwi first social impact investment, and the first transparent crowdlending campaign in New Zealand. We wanted to give investors an opportunity to not only support us, but to support kiwi kids in need.”
PledgeMe CEO Anna Guenther added:
“We’ve been really excited to see the range of supporters that have come through and pledged to this campaign.” says. We truly believe this campaign will be the first of many companies and organisations looking to transparently borrow money from their crowds. The exciting thing for us, is it shows that there is a new way of doing enterprise: social enterprise.”
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