Let's Cash in the chips: BillyChip
Let's Cash in the chips: BillyChip
Jon Hope, co-founder of BillyChip, tells us how they’re empowering homeless people and encouraging more people and businesses to easily offer support.
What is BillyChip?
BillyChip is a safe currency to support homeless people. Customers can buy a BillyChip from supporting businesses for a £2 donation and then gift it to a homeless person as an alternative to cash. Creating a secure way to provide help and support if you don’t carry cash, it also removes the fear that your donation could be used to support a harmful addiction; the recipient can redeem the BillyChip token in any participating outlet for, at least, a hot or cold takeaway drink of choice.
Where did the idea come from?
As the name suggests, it was Billy’s idea. Billy Abernethy-Hope was a 20-year-old ambulance driver who was disappointed at the lack of direct donations the public gave to people on the streets. Billy recognised the isolation rough sleepers felt and wanted to create a scheme that would overcome the barriers the public saw to giving cash and interacting with homeless people. Tragically, Billy lost his life in a motorbike accident while travelling in Thailand in 2018 so his family continued with his scheme and launched it in his memory.
How can people help?
What is your impact?
Many homeless people and rough sleepers describe themselves as invisible and often feel rejected by society. The BillyChip is a safe way for people to directly donate to someone sleeping rough. Homeless people report that having a BillyChip donated to them has a positive impact on their mental health, as asking for change is humiliating and degrading. Having the choice to use the BillyChip token when and where they choose and to be able to meet their own dietary requirements is empowering. Such simple choices are typically removed from those facing life on the streets; choice provides dignity which equals positive change.
What would you like to see change in your area?
We are disrupters and champions of change and we are working tirelessly to get the BillyChip scheme into every coffee shop chain on the high street. Our scheme is free to operate, we pay outlets for the hot or cold takeaway drinks they provide, and all our profits go to homeless charities. This means big businesses who operate our free scheme can connect communities, support homeless people, and deliver their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) at no cost to their business. It just makes sense, and we’d love to see more businesses recognise the benefits.
What's your biggest challenge?
The BillyChip is a completely unique business model. Billy has created a circular social economy which creates wealth, but it will take a certain level of investment and time to get the scheme to a place where it is self-funding and generating money for charities, as well as providing sustenance for homeless people.
We are a small team and don’t have the resources to fundraise, operate the scheme, market ourselves, attract new outlets and apply for largescale funding all at the same time. So our biggest challenge is securing funding. Big charities have the resources to apply for significant funding while fledgling enterprises are often left with the scraps, which makes scaling up your social enterprise all the more challenging. But we are young, enthusiastic and passionate about making a global change and we will continue regardless of the challenges we face.
What is a social enterprise to you
We never set out to create a social enterprise, we were gifted this concept as a legacy from a visionary young man whose kindness, generosity and compassion was a lesson for us all. If everyone did one kind thing a day to benefit a stranger, we would live in a very different world. All businesses should be social enterprises, all workers should be stakeholders in a cooperative. Excessive wealth and greed, which is always connected to exploitation somewhere along the line, should not be something we celebrate or aspire to achieve, but we live in a capitalistic economy where extreme wealth is celebrated and is recognised as an achievement, regardless of the cost to others.
What's next for BillyChip?
It has been an amazing journey for us and we’ve achieved incredible things in a very short period. If you throw in a global pandemic and all the other challenges we’ve overcome I’m very positive BillyChip has a bright future ahead. We have interest from across the world for BillyChip – sadly, communities everywhere recognise the tremendous hardship people are facing with the cost-of-living crisis.
Pretty much every town and city in the UK has both coffee shops and homeless people so we are rolling out with a number of nationwide high street brands this year and continue to put plans in place to take BillyChip global, so we can share the kindness and deliver compassion, connections and choice to people across the world, as Billy envisioned.
A Little chip...
… can make a big difference. To find out how to support BillyChip, visit billychip.com
This is a feature from Issue 15 of Charitable Traveller.
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