Roger Mensah and his team aren’t trying to reinvent the crowdfunding wheel with their latest start-up,
Endless Crowds. They're trying to carve out a niche for a group of public servants that is too often overlooked.
"We're opening up a niche for military veterans and first responders," says Mensah, who co-founded Endless Crowds with two partners.
The team of three launched the company at the end of the January, creating a crowd-funding portal specifically for military veterans, first responders, and their families. The idea is to help them make a space for their own projects where they don’t have to compete for attention with the rest of the world.
Mensah was inspired to create the site a few years ago when President Obama was speaking about the draw down of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mensah knew they would be coming home to the deepest recession in the U.S. since the Great Depression.
"It occurred to me that the economy was so bad then, especially for the guys and girls coming back, that I thought they should have a (crowd funding) site just for them," Mensah says.
Mensah and his team built Endless Crowds at
Bamboo Detroit in downtown Detroit. Among the projects that have gone through the website are an effort to build a home for homeless women veterans and projects with the Detroit Public Safety Foundation. Mensah hopes to do work with Detroit Police Department and the Detroit Fire Department over the rest of the year and establish the website as a presence in Metro Detroit.
Source: Roger Mensah, founder of Endless Crowds
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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