GiveSendGo

Previous clients have included Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse, who used the platform to raise funds for their legal defense. ^{6  7}

Background

GiveSendGo is an online crowdfunding platform that allows individuals and organizations to raise funds for various life events and causes. This includes projects, medical expenses, missions, disaster relief, celebrations, and other needs. ⁵ Each month, GiveSendGo claims to designate portions of its operation expenses to “Give Back” to active campaigns on its website. ⁸ The company does not charge money to use the platform, unlike other crowdsourcing sites such as GoFundMe that charge processing fees. It takes voluntary contributions from users that it calls “givers” and “goers.” ⁴

It claims to be the “#1 Free Christian Crowdfunding Site” while co-founder Jacob Wells has previously stated “We’re a business and we’re trying to provide a service.” ⁹ According to the group website, it claims that its focus on client selection is to not to “take one side or another politically, but in the middle of a divided political culture, we were to be focused on the very reason we started GiveSendGo, to share the Hope of Jesus through crowdfunding to everyone who comes to our platform.”  ⁴

The group was co-founded in 2015 by siblings Heather Wilson, Jacob Wells, and Emmalie Arvidson  ^{2 10} to provide a platform for individuals to raise funds as a way of “providing hope for people’s spiritual needs.” ⁸ The group’s website further argued that the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020 helped push it “into the political spotlight for allowing a campaign that mainstream media had shut down and was censoring.”  ⁸

In April 2021, left-wing magazine The Nation released a story in which the outlet interviewed Wilson and Wells asking if the group would ever accept a fundraiser from the Ku Klux Klan. Wells answered, “Some of these campaigns are situational,” while Wilson stated, “It would depend on what they were raising money for.” ² However, an April 2026 article by the American Prospect stated that GiveSendGo does not allow campaigns that promote or fund “gender reassignment surgeries” for minors or abortions. ⁷

In 2022, the website for GiveSendGo was hacked with the names of over 92,000 donors being released online. A story by Vice claimed that 56 percent of donors released by the hack were from the United States, 29 percent were from Canada, while others were reportedly from international locations such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. ¹¹

Activities

In 2020, the organization allowed a fundraiser on its platform to raise over $500,000 in legal defense fees for Kyle Rittenhouse, a man been charged with shooting and killing two individuals and the injury of a third during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse would later be acquitted of all charges in 2021.  ⁷

Following the 2020 elections, the platform was notably used for fundraising efforts supporting several participants in President Donald Trump’s challenges to the November 2020 electoral results. GiveSendGo hosted fundraisers for Jeffrey Clark, Jenna Ellis, and John Eastman, all attorneys who had supported the challenges.  ¹² In 2022, the group also permitted a fundraiser supporting the “Freedom Convoy,” a trucker-led protest in Ottawa against Canada’s COVID-19 restrictions.  ¹²

In 2023, GiveSendGo’s services helped raise $3 million for the legal defense of Daniel Penny, a former U.S. Marine, after he was charged in the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless New York City resident. Penny was accused of placing Neely in a chokehold after the latter became erratic against subway passengers and the former attempted to subdue him resulting in his strangulation. Penny was acquitted in December 2024. ^{6  13}

In 2025, the platform was used to organize a fundraiser for Karmelo Anthony, a Texas teen accused of stabbing and killing another student during a track meet. Co-founder and co-CEO Heather Wilson defended leaving up the fundraiser despite backlash, claiming they were seeing “similar outrage from the right as we once did from the left.”  ¹⁴ That same year, the platform was used in a fundraiser that raised over $700,000 for Minnesota resident Shiloh Hendrix after she admitted to using a racial slur against an African-American child after she accused the child of stealing from her purse.  ^{14  15}

In 2026, the platform was used in raising legal defense funds for Jonathan Ross, an agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who was accused of shooting and killing Minneapolis resident Renee Good in her vehicle. Ross argued that he discharged his weapon in self-defense when Good drove her vehicle near him and other ICE agents and accused her of allegedly trying to run him over.   ⁷

Controversy

In 2023, Rolling Stone released an article claiming that over a dozen fundraising campaigns operated through the site had been accused of having ties to white-supremacist organizations and accused the group of failing to uphold their own terms of service, which state the platform would not permit crowdsourcing used to “promote hate, violence, [and] racial intolerance.”  ¹² That year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism issued a report that accused GiveSendGo of being “a singularly important part of the extremist fundraising ecosystem” while having a “tolerance towards violent extremism on its platform.”  ¹²

In 2025, Wilson released a post on social media defending the platform’s permissions for use, arguing, “A few key things to consider: 1. In each of these high-profile cases, someone tragically lost their life…[t]hat’s the role of our justice system…[i]f we truly believe in consequences, let’s make sure they come through due process — not mob outrage. Let the facts come out. Let the courts decide. Let us remain consistent.”  ⁴