A high school teacher in Iowa wanted to travel to Ecuador as an interpreter for a medical mission team, so she started a GoFundMe with a goal of $1,800. The unusual part was how she reportedly tried to raise the money. She allegedly offered her high school students extra credit in exchange for donations. The school district later fired her, citing violations of its ethics policies.
Offering academic credit for donations raises obvious ethical concerns. But the story also reflects a larger shift in how Americans respond when the money for something is not there: increasingly, one option is to ask other people to help pay for it.
Kickstarter launched in 2009. GoFundMe followed in 2010. Before online crowdfunding, financial needs were more likely to be handled through family, friends, churches, neighbors, or local organizations. Today, a fundraiser can be created in minutes and shared far beyond a person's immediate community. By 2016, Pew Research Center found that roughly one in five American adults had already donated through a crowdfunding site.
That reach can be enormously helpful. A family loses its home in a fire. Someone develops cancer. A spouse dies unexpectedly. Medical bills accumulate as income disappears. There are circumstances that can overwhelm savings, insurance, and even careful planning. In those cases, crowdfunding gives friends, neighbors, churches, and even strangers another way to help.
But not every appeal fits so neatly into that category.
When Hardship Doesn't Change the Lifestyle
More difficult questions arise when the financial need appears genuine, but the lifestyle around it remains largely unchanged. Someone may lose a job or experience a major setback while continuing to travel, maintain expensive activities, keep multiple vehicles or memberships, and spend on other discretionary expenses.
The question then becomes whether donations are helping someone through an unavoidable hardship or helping maintain expenses that the person can no longer reasonably afford.
There is a difference between saying, "I cannot afford this," and saying, "I cannot afford this without changing the way I currently live."
Financial hardship has typically required some adjustment. Families postpone purchases, cut travel, sell possessions, move to less expensive housing, or step away from activities that no longer fit the budget. The hardship shows up not only in a bank balance, but in the choices that have to be made because circumstances have changed.
Crowdfunding adds another possibility. Instead of reducing expenses or giving something up, a person can turn to a wider circle of donors for help. The need may still be real, but its cause can vary. Sometimes an unexpected crisis overwhelms a household through no reasonable amount of preparation. In other cases, previous spending or a reluctance to cut expenses may have contributed to the shortage.
Those situations are not the same. Many Americans are under real pressure from housing, food, insurance, medical costs, and other necessities. For households already operating with little room to spare, even a relatively modest emergency can become a serious financial problem.
But not every financial shortfall begins with an unavoidable emergency. Sometimes income was sufficient until it was spent on travel, activities, purchases, or a standard of living that left little reserve when circumstances changed. There is nothing inherently wrong with those expenses. The question is what responsibility remains with the person who made them when the money runs short.
Sometimes hardship means accepting that life will look different for a while. Sometimes the answer is simply: we cannot afford it.
When Extras Start Looking Like Needs
Actress Alyssa Milano faced criticism in 2024 after sharing a GoFundMe for her son's baseball team to travel from Southern California to Cooperstown, New York, for a youth tournament. Critics questioned why a wealthy celebrity was asking the public to help fund the trip. Milano responded that she had contributed herself, including paying for uniforms and helping cover expenses for players whose families could not afford them.
Her response underscored that the situation was more complicated than the initial criticism suggested. But it also raised a broader question about what fundraising is increasingly used to provide.
A cross-country youth baseball tournament may be a valuable experience, but it is still an optional one. If a team cannot afford airfare, hotels, meals, and the other costs involved, fundraising is one possible response. Another is choosing a tournament closer to home.
The distinction between a need and an extra can become less clear when crowdfunding makes it possible to finance experiences that otherwise would simply be out of reach. Families are free to ask, and donors are free to give. But the existence of a fundraising platform does not make every unaffordable expense a financial need.
Crowdfunding has also changed the relationship between giving and accountability.
When assistance comes through family members, friends, neighbors, or a church, the people providing help often know more than the story presented in an appeal. They know what happened, how the family is living, and what steps are being taken to recover. Their help may include money, meals, childcare, transportation, or something less comfortable but equally valuable: an honest conversation about what needs to change.
An online donor usually has none of that context. A person can read a compelling story, contribute $20, and never know much more about the circumstances behind it. That generosity can still do real good. But it is a different kind of help from support that exists within an ongoing relationship.
Carry the Burden, Carry the Load
Galatians 6 offers Christians a useful framework for holding these ideas together. Verse 2 tells believers to "carry one another's burdens." A few verses later, Paul writes that "each person will have to carry his own load."
A common illustration describes the burden as a boulder and the load as a backpack. Some circumstances are too heavy for one person to carry alone. Death, disease, disability, disaster, and catastrophic loss can become those boulders. Community helps lift them.
But there are also responsibilities that remain ours to carry: our spending, obligations, priorities, and the adjustments required when circumstances change.
The difficulty is knowing which is which.
Ideally, someone should not have to exhaust every dollar or reach complete financial ruin before receiving help. Compassion does not require that. At the same time, receiving help does not necessarily remove the responsibility to make difficult changes.
Crowdfunding gives us a reason to consider both sides more carefully. If our own circumstances changed, what would we cut, postpone, sell, or simply accept that we could no longer afford? And when someone else needs help, can our generosity include enough relationship to understand what that person actually needs?
Giving through a church, helping a neighbor, buying groceries for a friend, or supporting someone we know allows generosity to remain connected to the person receiving it. Sometimes that means helping carry something too heavy for one person. Other times it may mean caring enough to say that something has to change.
We are called to carry one another's burdens. We are also responsible for carrying our own load.
Healthy community requires both compassion and responsibility.
