Why OpenCharities exists

In 2020, my mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. She was 56.

As her condition progressed and she moved into a nursing home in 2024, I felt a growing drive to contribute in a more meaningful way. With my background in banking and blockchain, my first idea was practical: start a charity in the dementia space focused on relieving emotional pain for patients and their families, while enabling them to create meaningful memories together.

From the start, I wanted it to work differently. Transparent donation flows, community-driven initiatives that could scale on intrinsic motivation instead of heavy overhead and bureaucracy. But I found it impossible to do this with the platforms that were available.

In exploring what it would take to build that, I realized it wouldn't make sense to do all this work just for one charity. Enabling these same benefits for all charities and impactful initiatives would have far greater reach.

That is where the idea of OpenCharities as a platform was born.

Across the charity sector, people give generously and with good intentions. But many donors experience a lack of visibility once their donation is made. Funds move into organizational structures, updates are delayed or abstract, and it is often difficult to understand what impact a specific contribution helped create.

This is not about bad intent. In many cases, it is the result of systems designed for a different era, one where transparency was hard to deliver, reporting was manual, and trust had to be assumed rather than supported by real-time information.

Globally, charitable giving exceeds €650 billion per year, yet a growing group of especially younger donors is turning away from traditional charities because they expect visibility, participation, and accountability by default.

It started from personal pain, but is now driven by the belief that this experience can be transformed into shared, lasting impact.