After just 2 years, the charity Sean's Outpost has fed its 150,000th meal to the homeless today using Bitcoin.

“Just take a moment to appreciate how many meals that really is. It's probably more than double the meals you will eat in your lifetime,” posted Jason King, founder of Sean’s Outpost on Facebook.

There are 1,750,000 homeless people in the United States, up 150,000 since 2013. It would take 1.9 billion meals to feed these homeless people, a staggering number from the country known for its super-sized food portions. This is the constant tide Sean’s Outpost is trying push back.

Sean's Outpost is the largest provider of meals to the homeless in Escambia County Florida, and has the unique distinction of being the only homeless outreach in the world primarily funded by cryptocurrency. Jason King explained in his talk “Innovation for Social Entrepreneurship in the Bitcoin Space” at The North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami the benefits of Bitcoin for charities and non-profits:

“Bitcoin is significantly cheaper than credit card processing. If you think of 1.7% to 3.4% fee to process those transactions and for the right to get that money. Sean’s Outpost has raised approximately $240,000 in 20 months, we have saved $8400 just for using bitcoin instead of credit cards. $8400 is a good amount of money but to a non-profit that it is a huge amount of money. Which means that at Sean’s Outpost we were able to feed an additional 6720 meals to the homeless, simply because we took Bitcoin rather than credit cards.”

King is also developing an app with lead developer Bryce Case (YTCracker) to further help solve the hunger problem called “Outpost Everywhere”. The location-based app’s main feature will have 2 options, “give a meal” and “get a meal”, and will connect people who would like to donate a meal with the homeless. This simple function can transform how people engage with and help the homeless, and King also hopes to extend the scheme’s functionality, to include the ability to place beacons on those who have basic goods like blankets, clothes, etc. that they can donate, and the ability to tag those who need those items the most.

This is just one of King’s many projects to help the homeless both in his area and around the world. In his neck of the woods, he launched Satoshi Forest a while back. It functions as a “homeless sanctuary”, a safe place for the homeless people in the Pensacola area to come and rest, interact, and set up camp. He also has talked of creating a program to help the homeless by helping them build houses to live in. This of course is a harder task to take on and requires more time to incubate.

To donate to Sean’s Outpost, support the work of Jason King and his team and help feed the homeless, please donate to 38ccq12hPFoiSksxUdr6SQ5VosyjY7s9AU

Jason will be speaking at The Texas Bitcoin Conference on distributed and decentralized non-profits.

Social sharing monetizes: all proceeds from this article will go to Sean’s Outpost.

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