Friends who give together — making a difference.

Three best friends are using all their mental, marketing, and physical skills to make a difference for women in Korah, Ethiopia.

Ride for Korah from Locke + Stache on Vimeo.

Cause: Funds and Awareness for the I Pour Life’s 10×10 Program

Sometimes, changing the world with your friends can happen. Ride for Korah is doing just that. It’s a grassroots campaign started by three friends. They are cycling cross-country to raise $50,000 for I Pour Life’s 10×10 program in Korah, Ethiopia.

The 10×10 program is a women-led, family empowerment program. The program targets impoverished groups of women with a diagnosis of leprosy at risk of losing their children. Participants learn a trade and become financially self-sufficient. Over ten months, women begin taking steps to lift themselves out of extreme poverty through earning power.

The Ride for Korah’s campaign will provide fifty Ethiopian women a “hand up”—a chance to turn their lives around and break cycles of poverty in their community.

We're more than halfway to sending our first woman through @ipourlife's 10×10 program! For just $1,000, one woman in Korah will be given a life-changing hand up and a way out of extreme poverty for herself and her family. Visit the link in our bio to help us sponsor our first woman. Photo by @bulgerjoseph

A post shared by Ride For Kore (@rideforkore) on Mar 21, 2016 at 8:39am PDT

Campaign Goal: $50,000

Starting in May and through August 2016, Giancarlo Ospina, Jesse Tyler, and Dakota Graff will be cycling across America to raise funds and awareness for I Pour Life’s women’s empowerment program in Ethiopia.

Each of the Ride Team has a background in marketing and creative work so they “wanted to put their skills to the test and build the campaign from the ground up.”

Talk about #squadgoals… An outtake from a shoot for the @springfieldnl. Maybe we should have submitted this one?

A post shared by Ride For Kore (@rideforkore) on Apr 15, 2016 at 3:25pm PDT

How they are raising money online.

The ride team wouldn’t consider themselves developers. Mostly, they’re marketers at heart and marketers with a heart.

They used the Jupiter WordPress theme to create the design for their WordPress-powered web property.

Jesse Tyler freely admits,

“Though we had some experience using these tools, we are not developers by any stretch of the imagination. We just know enough CSS and HTML to be dangerous.”

At Give, we don’t consider the lack of code knowledge as dangerous, but we appreciate how the Ride for Korah team is so humble in their efforts.

And despite core PHP skills or the ability to integrate a payment gateway using Code, the team was able to empower their donation website.

“The Give Donation plugin was a godsend to us! We wanted a simple giving tool that would integrate with Braintree and show a progress meter toward our $50,000 fundraising goal. Give was a perfect fit for this. In nearly no time at all, we had our form up and running and were collecting donations with ease.”

Campaign Results

As of April 2016, Ride for Korah has raised nearly $4,500 – that’s almost ten percent of their goal and the ride hasn’t begun yet.

Four! This isn't gonna get old for us. We've already raised enough to sponsor four women in Korah! We are so moved by the generosity of our friends and strangers so far. Thank you! This is no time to slow down, though. We've got 46 more women to go! #rideforkorah #becausewereable

A post shared by Ride For Kore (@rideforkore) on Apr 18, 2016 at 4:48pm PDT

By the end of August 2016, they believe the campaign will go beyond their $50,000 fundraising goal.

Be sure to follow them on Twitter and Instagram. They also offer an email newsletter and you can check out their donation form here.

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