In an effort to find hip and under-the-radar charities, founders Bryan Edwards and Ben Scharlin stumbled onto an idea that lacked an online presence. They found stale lists and boring facts about charities but none inspired charitable action or gave the charities themselves a voice. The duo sought out to create better.
Fresh Charities was born with the idea that an aesthetically pleasing design will attract the charitably curious, while simple functionality will help charities connect and interact with a public who is excited to make a difference.
With the addition of its third member, Stefani Beckerman, Fresh Charities went from an inspired idea to a team fully dedicated to creating a platform designed to promote charitable giving. We want to change the world; here is where we start. Fresh Charities links inspiration, positive social energy, and creative souls together, to share and experience innovative charitable endeavors.
Fresh Charities is committed to relentlessly developing this community so that charities and users alike can connect and become empowered to make charitable giving part of each of our everyday routines.
No stranger to charitable giving, Bryan Edwards demonstrated an innate desire for world peace and concern for all animals at an early age. At age 6, Bryan decided to become a vegetarian so that animals would trust him should he consider veterinary school. At 10, he joined the Seattle Peace Theater helping to create original musicals about peace with youth groups in Moscow and Switzerland. At 16, Bryan represented the US for Peace Child International at Habitat for Humanities Summit in Istanbul Turkey where he and his peers strategized how the U.S could build sustainable cities of the future.
While Edwards passed on veterinary school, he gradated from Duke University earning a Bachelor of Science in Biological Anthropology & Anatomy and a minor in Visual Arts. After college Bryan pursued his love of tap dance on the world tour of Magic of Dance, performing in countries all over the world.
Currently, Bryan uses his artistic nature as a graphic designer to translate experiences and ideas of beauty into images on the screen. It is his holistic view of the environment and world cultures that inspired Bryan to create a place where others who are passionate about this earth can unite and share experiences; to build a community that is working towards the same inspired goal: using our energies to make this life rich as possible.
The environment has always inspired Ben Scharlin. In High School, he completed an Outward Bound course where he spent a month in High Sierras mountaineering and surviving in dramatically breathtaking landscapes that would shape his mentality about nature and the environment forever.
After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied creative writing and theater, he enrolled in the National Outdoor Leadership School and spent two months in the East African Wilderness, climbing to the top of Mt. Kenya, hiking from crater to crater in Tanzania, living and traveling with the Masai and sailing from island to island in the Indian Ocean. During his trip he rigorously studied low impact wilderness survival techniques, navigation, geology and Swahili, as well as honed his leadership and communication skills.
Having spent much of his life growing up in the Philippines, his mother’s native country, Ben was witness to the harsh realities of social inequality and overwhelming poverty from an early age. Returning to the clean and glistening world of the United States never diminished his knowledge of a suffering population half way around the world. It only ignited his desire to take action for the well being of all suffering people around the globe.
Splitting his years between Los Angeles and New York City, Ben is an avid urban explorer and bicyclist, an armature city historian, a fan of public transportation and supporter of sustainable living. An actor and artist by trade and amongst his experiences with people and environments throughout his life and around the world, Ben’s passion for Fresh Charities took flame with the realization that the promotion of charitable action was the only road to a safe, healthy, empathetic and sustainable world.
A Dallas, Texas native, Stefani Beckerman, 25, received her Bachelor Degree at Arizona State University in 2008. Stefani studied Creative Writing and Women’s Studies that kept her in a curriculum centered on analytical thinking, creativity, and a strong desire to change the world through empowerment and inspired action. After college Stefani’s creative nature and artistic craving led her to the Entertainment business in Los Angeles, California where she began working at Brillstein Entertainment Partners. Through the industry Stefani developed a network of peers and mentors that facilitated the idea that in our connectedness, we are empowered, in our empowerment we are strong, and in our strength we are able to make great advances in this world. It is this belief that united Stefani with Bryan and Ben to create a solid team that is passionate towards inspiring and being inspired through charitable giving and receiving.
photos by: brian higbee photography
Fresh Charities aims to connect the charitably curious to the world of local and global organized giving by providing a place where the two can meet, communicate, connect and take action together for the well being and general improvement of our planet and everything that lives on it. (Learn More)
