New App Lets You Help The Homeless Without Feeding Their Addictions

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If you find yourself wishing that you could help those on the streets but want to make sure your money is being put to good use, a new app might be of interest to you.

Carebacks is an app that allows people to give a donation in the form of a virtual gift card that can be redeemed at a participating vendor, like Salvation Army and Winn Dixie. Once the donation is made, the recipient gets a 4-digit pin that they will need to redeem their funds. The donation cannot, however, be redeemed for items like alcohol or tobacco. The app will even alert you when your donation has been redeemed, one of the features the company hopes will help its donors feel good and encourage to keep giving.

Image via Google Play/Carebacks

Image via Google Play/Carebacks

“You can also track it, which is pretty cool,” Carebacks marketing manager George Van Wormer told FOX 8 News in New Orleans.

It can tell you when it was redeemed and where it was redeemed. So you gain that personal aspect from it, and at the end of the year, you can see how much you’ve given.”

Any Carebacks not redeemed are donated to a charity at the end of the month, so donors can rest easy that their money goes to someone in need no matter what.

The donations start at $5 with a small service fee that goes back to the company to continue funding its growth and development. Carebacks is now live and running in New Orleans, but the company behind the app, SusCo, hopes to expand the service nationwide soon. Until then, creator Neel Sus hopes the app will serve as an inspiration for others to create similar services—for the purpose of just doing some good, if not for the sake of some good-natured competition.

“I actually look forward to copycats,” Sus told WGNO in New Orleans.

Obviously I’d prefer to be the Facebook of it but if we become the MySpace of it but start a revolution, then so be it.”

Currently, the app is available for Android and in Web format, with an iOS version said to be in the works.