Charles F. Milton is the Founder & CEO of Bursity.org, a Toronto Founder Institute portfolio company. Bursity is an online platform that helps marginalized students gain access to millions of dollars and funding opportunities across Canada and the U.S., helping them secure better enrollment opportunities for post-secondary education.
Bursity was born through Milton’s own firsthand experiences and challenges that he faced, as a mature student working to gain access to financial resources available to help him fund his own college tuition. He quickly saw the need for a social enterprise solution for the massive higher ed funding challenges facing people who are marginalized due to their gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background.
Bursity’s mission statement is to “lower hurdles to higher learning” and they aim to accomplish this in two ways. On the consumer end, Bursity helps students streamline the process for finding and filing their scholarships by providing them with access to a curated list of scholarship opportunities tailored to their specific background and unique circumstances.
On business end, Bursity helps scholarship sponsors by creating a client relationship manager software tool so that they can list all of their scholarships onto Bursity’s site. From there, Bursity helps these sponsors intake awards, and cut their operations and administration costs so they can put more money towards their impact initiatives.
Watch below to see the full-length interview with Bursity Founder, Charles F Milton.
Key Topics:
- The founder’s personal journey and startup experience
- Bursity’s platform, target customers, and use cases
- The challenges that marginalized student populations face in accessing funding to post-secondary education
- Bursity’s perspective on creating long-tail social impact
- How Bursity’s platform strives towards lowering hurdles and enabling greater access to higher education
- The company's philosophy and their vision for the future of EdTech over the next 10 years
As a five-time startup founder, Milton shares some poignant words of wisdom from his personal experiences with startup failure and success, stating:
Make sure if you start a company that you follow your heart, and start a company that you care about…solve a problem that you love. Because when you’re going through the feast or famine cycles, it will motivate you to spring out of bed every single day... to make sure you execute to get that thing done.
If you are a student seeking post-secondary education scholarship or funding opportunities, founder Charles F. Milton encourages you to signup to test their Beta, at Bursity.org.
Bursity is also building a recruitment platform for sponsors and universities, to help them gain direct access to marginalized students within their local area who are currently using Bursity’s platform to find scholarships. To learn more, you can reach out by email to the Bursity team at yourfriends@bursity.ca.
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