Fundraising

Growing up, Kiera Molloy’s family took her to megachurches on Sundays and sent her to Christian camps over the summer. When it was time for college, she was eager to stay plugged into the Christian community.

Molloy had a friend at Detroit’s College of Creative Studies who was in student leadership with the campus Cru. When her friend found out Molloy also planned to attend Creative Studies, she invited her to check out Cru. When Molloy arrived on campus that fall, she quickly started attending Cru meetings.

Molloy’s friend was appointed to Cru staff shortly thereafter, and the two met up weekly throughout Molloy’s freshman year.

It was not until Molloy’s sophomore year that she found out these were not just casual meet-ups.

“She was getting paid to hang out with me,” Molloy said.

Molloy had unknowingly entered into a discipler-disciple relationship. Her friend on staff was clocking hours with Cru every time they grabbed lunch together — she was being paid to keep tabs on Molloy’s spiritual growth.

“When I left Cru, she basically cut me off,” Molloy said. “We would hang out every week for like three years. And then as soon as I left, that was it.”

Molloy’s discipler confided that she and her husband had been going through financial difficulties. Cru staff are required to fundraise their full salaries in their own free time, sending regular donor requests to family, friends, and acquaintances.

Once Molloy no longer subscribed to Cru’s belief system, there was no more money to be made spending time with her.

“It really did end pretty abruptly,” Molloy said.

According to several former Cru staff, being on staff meant working around the clock discipling students, evangelizing on campus, leading Bible studies, planning events and retreats, providing oversight to student leadership teams, and attending other local Cru activities.

“I’d compare it to some kind of sales program,” said Matt Brewer, a former member of the Cru ministry at the University of Mississippi. In order to raise enough money to earn a living wage, he said, staff must beg for funds from family, friends and strangers alike.

‘Baptized capitalism’

Cru stresses participation in mission trips as nothing short of mandatory. Multiple former members described the immense pressure they felt from leadership to sign up for summer mission trips, which comes at a cost.

Molloy said a student’s faith and dedication to God would be questioned if they expressed hesitation about participating in a mission trip, regardless of how legitimate their reason might be.

“I feel like this is a real guilt trip,” Molloy said. “You’re not a good Christian if you can’t get the money.”

Like with staff salaries, Cru requires students to raise their own funds in order to go on a trip. Interested students have to meet a set fundraising goal before they’re accepted as attendees. The goal can range anywhere from $5,000 to over $60,000 depending on the location and length of the trip.

Molloy said she felt “pressured” by Cru to attend a mission trip to Cuba in the summer of 2019. Molloy said the weight of fundraising caused her to begin experiencing extreme symptoms of anxiety.

“That was the first time I had experienced panic attacks,” Molloy said. “I was just worried about the money.”

Students are taught to ask everyone they know for money, Molloy said. They are taught how to reach out to family friends and church connections, and they are provided with templates they can use to create donor requests. Students are also assigned to a staff member who calls them weekly for fundraising updates.

A written document published by Cru gives strategic advice on how students can effectively ask for money.

“You may be thinking you could never generate more than a handful of names,” the document reads, “but research has shown the average individual has a personal network of at least 400 friends and acquaintances. So, you should be able to develop a list of at least 100 potential ministry partners.”

Over 30 former Cru members unilaterally expressed extreme discomfort with fundraising. Asking parents for connections, cold-calling old family friends, and sending personal newsletters to donors left students feeling “gross,” “awkward,” and “uncomfortable,” they said.

Casey Fiore attended Cru at University of Wisconsin at Madison from 2010 to 2012. She quit her job to intern with Cru at 24 years old. She said lost 30 pounds from stress alone during the process of raising financial support. “It was the worst year of my life,” she said.

Fiore said working with Cru “instilled in me that raising support is normal and not being paid for your work is normal.” She described her years with Cru as “an incredibly damaging experience.”

All donations to Cru must be made through a Cru-owned website so that students never touch the money they’re raising, former members corroborated. Multiple students confirm that no breakdown is provided to show how the money raised is spent.

If the student’s fundraising goal is not fully met, Cru keeps whatever money was raised. Former members who found themselves in this situation said they were never able to find out how Cru used their money.

During their mission trip, students are given a monthly stipend to cover living expenses. Any dry spells in their fundraising will be reflected in these paychecks. The same is true of Cru staff members who fail to raise enough money to cover their salary.

Rebecca Carey’s campus Cru at the University of Texas in San Antonio was racially diverse, something Carey and other former members describe as uncommon in Cru spaces. They said the way Cru went about fundraising was “a very white way of doing it.”

Carey, who is Hispanic, explained that in non-white communities it is frowned upon to give money to someone without being given something concrete in return. “You don’t get something for nothing,” they said. Their friends who grew up in Black, Hispanic and Asian cultures often struggled to raise enough money to participate in mission trips and conferences, they said.

Carey raised money to go on a one-year trip to China, but her Cru team didn’t meet its fundraising goal by the deadline. She said the only reason they were allowed to go to China was because “Cru’s national staff noticed how diverse our team was, and so they covered the rest of the cost for us.” But, Carey added, “They told us not to tell anyone about it.”

Full-time job, no pay

Cru staff have to fundraise their entire salaries on their own time in order to make a living wage. The money they raise covers their paycheck, healthcare benefits, training and expenses.

Former Cru member Rachel Duryea, who was on Cru staff in California from 2017 to 2021, described the weight of fundraising a salary. “A lot of people leave staff simply because people drop off their team [of donors],” she said.

If a staff member’s team of donors does not give enough money to cover the member’s living expenses, Cru does not supplement their salary. In fact, Cru takes 12% of all financial support raised by its members in order to cover organizational overhead costs. “We never really knew what that was actually going towards,” Duryea said.

She said after Cru took out taxes and their own 12% of her fundraised money, her allotted full-time salary in California averaged around $20 an hour. 

Zac Thompson, raised second-generation Cru, grew up living in Orlando — just a short drive from Cru’s national headquarters.

Thompson said they remember going to school with the children of high-up Cru officials and that it was “very clear they all had money.” Thompson’s parents, on the other hand, struggled to financially support their five children.

In order to provide for their family, Thompson said their parents’ entire lives revolved around fundraising. Thompson said they recall a childhood spent “folding prayer letters and stuffing envelopes.”

Tim Thompson, Zac’s sibling, described the impact his parents’ career had on their childhood.

“Everything we did and everywhere we went, there was a not-so-secret agenda of seeing supporters. We never really went on vacations,” he said. “That was never communicated super clearly to us kids — or maybe it was just something we couldn’t grasp.”

Some former Cru members still donate monthly to support friends they made on Cru staff, even after having left the organization due to stark disagreements.

Former member Olivia Persing described it as an internal battle she struggles to navigate.

“I don’t agree with what Cru teaches,” she said, “but I genuinely love these people and I want them to be able to eat food.”

Class in all the wrong ways

Even with the help of student loans, Rebecca Carey still had to work to be able to afford the cost of college. Several of their Cru friends enjoyed the full financial support of their parents and didn’t carry the same burden, they said.

Attending Cru’s annual Winter Conference costs between $300 to $400, Carey said. Not only do students have to pay their way, but if a Cru leader is discipling students and “one of your disciples can’t afford to go, you’re expected to help them financially.”

At the 2017 Winter Conference held in Dallas, Carey was in such dire financial straits that for the entire week of the conference, they survived on the hotel’s complimentary breakfast alone.

Carey says there’s “a hidden class issue” at Cru. People who have the connections to be able to fundraise money to attend conferences and mission trips end up being favored by leadership, she said. At the same time, poorer kids — often ethnic minorities — are frequently overlooked by staff.

“That’s just a very common thread,” Carey said, adding that these were “obvious class issues that no one wanted to address.”

Carey witnessed her Black, Hispanic, and Asian friends who were also in Cru struggle to find time to fulfill their Cru-related obligations — going to Bible studies, discipling new members, and evangelizing on campus.

Carey’s friends who had to take jobs to afford college could only disciple one person a semester. The friends whose parents paid for everything could disciple up to five people. The friends who had to work, they said, “complained about how they were always made to feel bad” by Cru because they couldn’t take on more disciples. 

Kenji Kuramitsu participated in Cru while attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2011 to 2012.

“Race was just not thought about very critically,” Kuramitsu said. “There was a very implicit white supremacist culture by which whiteness was just invisible.”

Rachel Duryea said she witnessed similar class divides in her Cru chapter at West Virginia University.

“The system was definitely built for white, well-off individuals, not for anyone from any other kind of ethnic cultural background,” Duryea said.