Cash for Your Party

Can a hundred bucks turn your Dunster walk-through into an Ibiza-worthy nightclub? If you're up for the challenge, check out The Party Fund, an NYC-based company that offers 10 weekly grants of $100 to college students who complete simple promotion tasks for their sponsors.

The brainchild of former Currier Ten-Man resident Daniel "Zak" Tanjeloff '08, The Party Fund is still in its launch period. This week's task, which goes live on Wednesday at 11 p.m., asks students to post a link to NerdWallet.com, a website which aims to match users with credit cards based on their spending habits. Grants will go to the first 10 people who post a two-sentence description of NerdWallet, including a link to its website, on a site with a .edu domain name, although Tanjeloff hopes that future tasks will involve social media.

To collect the grant money, winners must snap a photo of themselves with 10 friends at the funded party, holding signs that declare their love for the sponsor. ("Don't be a smartass and actually take a picture that says 'We love Sponsor,'" The Party Fund website advises.) Once the photo is uploaded, The Party Fund will send a reimbursement check. According to Tanjeloff, one lucky host in Quincy House has already been a recipient of a grant.

Tanjeloff, who remembers the perennial social space discussion from his own days at Harvard, drew his inspiration for The Party Fund from the now-defunct party grants that the Undergraduate Council provided while he was on campus. He sees these small grants as a way that students can utilize existing social spaces unencumbered by financial concerns.

"Obviously, a problem for many college students is they never have enough cash to party the way they want to," Tanjeloff said. "We are trying our best to address that problem."