With heated political rhetoric in today’s current climate, the divide among individuals is greater than ever. Gerry Poirier, who has dedicated her career to the financial sector, understands the power of creating unity through a trusted and safe online community called AngeLink. Developed to address socio-economic barriers and bring women together on a crowdfunding digital platform, AngeLink is a social impact company that truly delivers on its promise of breaking barriers.
“Early on, when I was working on Wall Street, I was often the only woman in the room. But when I worked overseas in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo, I was sometimes the only woman in the building. I experienced firsthand the economic disparity women face around the world and saw a significant problem that I wanted to solve. Women were being underserved across the entire economic spectrum, so I vowed one day to start a company to help level the playing field for women,” said Poirier.
Poirier started AngeLink with the idea of a “Female-Centric GoFundMe” to create a radically new ecosystem of financial inclusion and to elevate women to their highest potential. The company’s innovative crowdfunding platform enables a large number of individuals to come together and support those in need with small amounts of money shared through collective unity.
“I founded AngeLink to address pervasive gender inequality and economic disparity that continues to deny women a voice on a global level,” said Poirier.
Her idea was simple: to develop the world’s first female-powered crowdfunding community to connect, empower, and amplify female voices and improve the lives of billions.
“Every day, women struggle. No one should have to choose between feeding their children or paying rent. Women live a shared experience, being disadvantaged in so many aspects of their lives. Change is long overdue. The world faces a reckoning from centuries of gender bias and economic inequality in nearly every country,” said Poirier.
Women control over 85 percent of household spending on a global basis. However, they face significant economic inequality and make 20 percent less than men for doing the same work. According to a recent Forbes article, 78 percent of the U.S. population now live paycheck to paycheck.
“What people don’t realize is that the vast majority of this number are women, leaving them with less savings for unexpected expenses such as medical bills or emergencies. What’s worse is when women try to start a small business to earn more money and boost their income, 98 percent of them will be turned away from venture capital firms, leaving women disillusioned and economically disadvantaged,” said Poirier.
With AngeLink, Poirier is on a mission to unleash the economic power of women on a global scale, giving them a voice. “With a focus on female-forward missions, we’re helping to fill the gap for women who represent the global majority of underserved communities in every country,” said Poirier.
Having launched in June 2022, raising $8 million and gaining over 80,000 users thus far, AngeLink is growing rapidly. The company recently won the Best New Marketplace Bold Award by Crowdsourcing Week as well as the coveted Mindshare Award. AngeLink surpasses competitors with its innovative safe, secure, and trusted AI-driven platform, user-friendly free tools, and empathetic, caring female-centric community. The company announced the first AI-driven fundraising technology to help users share their stories. AngeLink’s unique, first-of-its-kind AI Wizard™ helps users create a more compelling narrative and catchy title to boost their fundraising success.
AngeLink is a social impact company where investors and philanthropists can see with total transparency where their money is going. With a 4.7 Trustpilot score compared to a score of 1.5 for the industry leader, AngeLink provides a safe haven for fundraisers and donors. With training videos and innovative tools to ensure transparency, AngeLink is the key to storytelling for fundraising campaigns. The platform is deep linked to all the major social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Pinterest, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) for users to easily share their fundraisers with friends, family, and community—all with the click of a button.
AngeLink’s impactful social impact platform can help to raise money for millions for cancer survivors seeking funds for medical co-pays and procedures often denied by insurance carriers. Noteworthy AngeLink campaigns raised $200,000 for Turkish earthquake victims and over $150,000 for hurricane victims in Florida. Other AngeLink fundraisers helped to pay for infertility treatments, school lunch debt, veterinary bills, educational expenses, after-school sports programs, and startup business expenses.
Since its inception, AngeLink’s journey has been about female empowerment, and Poirier credits her female-powered team with AngeLink’s incredible success thus far. Poirier has assembled top-tier talent, and over 90% of the AngeLink team are women. AngeLink’s CTO has a PhD in artificial intelligence, the company’s CFO comes from the largest payment company in the world, and the Head of Customer Operations led customer support at a major bank. All are women.
Gerry Poirier took the transactional approach to helping women through a peer-to-peer donation platform a step further when she founded the AngeLink Community Foundation (ACF) 501(c)(3). Poirier started ACF to advance economic equality and gender parity by building the world’s largest community to support women. At the forefront of impact philanthropy, ACF promotes scalable funding models to create the world’s largest donor community.
“ACF helps to address the root cause of economic disparity that continues to deny women a voice on a global level. We fuel creative initiatives through grants to charitable partners to create a better future and affect real and positive change,” said Poirier.
ACF is focused on three E’s: Education, Emergencies, and Entrepreneurship to amplify the power of AngeLink’s crowdfunding platform and provide matching funds and in-kind support to women.
Poirier is a member of the Women’s Business Owners Association, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women, and The Association of Women’s Business Centers. With AngeLink, Poirier is helping to curate solutions to support female entrepreneurs with management education, mentoring, networking, and access to capital. Not just in her company’s philosophy, mission, and team, but in her personal organizations and commitments, Poirier is dedicated to helping break the ceiling for the disparity in gender inequality.
“In nearly every country on earth, women are disadvantaged from centuries of economic inequality and gender bias, and change is long overdue,” said Poirier. The time for women has come, and they are rising up to secure a better future for themselves and their families.
“AngeLink’s female empowerment crowdfunding platform serves as a haven for everyday heroes and the angels among us. Through our platform, we’re not only empowering women, we’re bringing innovation to social impact for the things that matter most. We’re giving women the power to change the world and shining a light for all of humanity,” said Poirier.
For more information visit www.angelink.com