Gift Drive

Corinne Atwell (UVM ’27), Logan Vaughan (UVM ’27), and Miro Gohacki (UVM ’25)

Tell us about your venture and what inspired you to start it.

Gift drive is a free online platform to support nonprofits and fundraising for physical goods from their community. Think of local food shelf or a local homeless shelter. They accept physical goods to give to those in needs that they serve. Right now we help facilitate that transaction from the donor to the nonprofit organization. 

Gift Drive originally started out of my own personal experience with trying to donate to a local drive, and from that experience, I went and met with other organizations and other nonprofits here in Vermont and learned that there are a lot more problems than what it seems like from the outside. From the perspective of the organization side, it takes a lot of time to organize and run drives. They can't really track and manage their drives as well, they don't know when donations are arriving. I recognized these as a big pain point for these organizations. And now, with a lot of younger donors becoming interested in donating to these nonprofit organizations, many nonprofits are trying to harness those those first time donations through in kind goods to support the organization going forward.

How has Gift Drive evolved since you first started?

I originally kind of had the kernel of the idea around 2 years ago. Over the last like year or so, I've been seriously developing this idea with my 2 co-founders, Corinne Atwell and Miro Gohacki. We've been meeting with nonprofits, getting feedback and tailoring our idea around what would be most beneficial for the actual users. We do this by talking to nonprofits and consultants, going to conferences, and then, piece by piece, building platform with hopes to then have it be a tool for these. 

We launched officially in September of 2025 with the Williston Food Community Food Shelf, which is our most successful drive to date with over $12,000 raised. From that day on, we've helped over 45 organizations in collecting physical goods to help those in need. That was awesome.

What challenges were you facing before working with CIF? Did our support help you move forward?

I think CIF was a great place to just bounce ideas off of people who are knowledgeable in the entrepreneurial space and want to help our cause. It’s been really helpful to hear feedback and gain new perspectives from the people in CIF. In terms of pitch competitions, the practice of being in the high stake environment, feedback on content, testing new revenue models, and really just getting feedback overall, has been great. CIF also has a great network of entrepreneurs that has given us great exposure and even more insight into how we will land in this space.

What’s one key piece of advice or insight that you gained from working with us?

Well, I'd say there's many insights and pieces of advice. I have learned that the power of the network at UVM matters a lot. The more people that you are talking to about your idea, the more opportunities you have. The support from advisors that you have facilitated connections with or just having more people in your corner that want to help promote you and support you is really powerful. 

I also think in every part of the business that we have built so far, there's been some kind of CIF involvement, which has been amazing.

What impact are you most proud of so far?

I would say, from a personal standpoint, I think is really powerful that we're building a social venture that actually helps those in need. Building business is fun and all, but I think what really gets me up every morning is building something that helps people. Over the past couple months, I've heard a lot of great feedback from organizations saying that this is something that helps our organization and donors but, most importantly, helps the people that we're trying to serve. That has been really cool feedback to receive. Just like a couple weeks ago, we heard back from a homeless shelter here in Vermont, and they said they had been running a winter drive for the people they serve. They said that some of the items that had been purchased through Gift Drive actually went to save lives when we had the big cold streak. When I open that email in the morning and see that this is idea that we had has real impact. To be in a business that helps those in need and helps that transaction through the whole end-to-end process. That's what it's that's what I want to do with my life. 

What’s next for Gift Drive?

Growth. Right now, we're primarily focused in Vermont and supporting a lot of Vermont nonprofits, but we're looking to expand the platform and help as many people in as many organizations as possible. So from here on out, it's all about just getting a word out about gift drive and supporting organizations around the US. There's a lot of really cool things. We're still building the platform up. We're still testing a lot of stuff but we're trying to build those partnerships up to, again, just make gift drives as successful and make the organizations on gift drives as successful as possible.

How can others get involved or support your mission?

If you know a nonprofit organization, or if you are part of a nonprofit organization, you can go to giftdrive.org to 1st check us out and see what we're doing, and then also if you're looking or run donation drives and think that we could be of use. You can simply create a drive completely for free on the platform. If you're a donor and you're going to get more involved in your community, you can go onto our platform and see what kind of organizations are currently on there. And if there's any local ones or any at all that you want to support and help and make a difference in your community. Anyone who's listening to this, please do anything you can to help support what we're doing and help support, more importantly, the organizations on our platform to make a difference.