I'm Robert Hayes, I'm a writer, eBay reseller, and general entrepreneur who's always digging up new stuff to do. This is my current "new stuff" and I'm enjoying doing it. There are a lot of great referral programs out there, and if you have some organization you can make some good money, get some cool free stuff, and find new products and services that fit your life well.
This page did not start out as a referrals page. It started out with me wanting to create a resource site to help for people being released from prison. (I am an ex-con myself and I was looking for a way to help out.)
Ex-cons have a lot of needs when we get out of the joint, from food to clothing to transportation to plain old cash. And one big problem that many of us face is that we get out, we have these needs, the needs go unmet because we've lost our network of people and it's hard to get a job...and we turn back to crime.
I'm not excusing it, but it happens, and there are people who end up going back to prison because they committed a crime that they wouldn't have committed if they had just been able to get a ride or gotten a few hot meals.
I was really lucky and still had good legitimate support systems on the outside, and my transition was pretty pain-free - but not many of us are that lucky, and I wanted to share my luck a bit. Unfortunately, I'm not a billionaire who can wave a hand and order free meals and new suits for the 1700+ prisoners released every day - to say nothing of the 30,000+ people who get out of jail. (Yeah, it's a lot of people.)
So I thought, how can I get these resources into the hands of the people who need them? And it occurred to me that many ex-cons are people who have been out of normal society for a while. They don't have Uber accounts or DoorDash subscriptions or SoFi bank accounts. Which means they're eligible for all these great referrals...and they can get that stuff for free.
So I started building up this list of programs to get ex-cons stuff they needed - Uber ride credits and free checking accounts and a week's worth of good meals from a restaurant site, and so on. And as I did so, I realized that there was absolutely no reason to limit this to ex-cons. Anybody could take advantage of these offers.
So I made it a general purpose referral site. My brothers and sisters from the penitentiary are very welcome to take advantage of these deals, many of which are going to be incredibly helpful to people just getting out - but so is everyone else.
Interested in other resources for ex-cons? Check out the Lionheart Foundation's excellent state-by-state listing of re-entry programs.
Want to help ex-cons in a responsible way, but don't know how? Same place, sir or madam - they are doing yeoman work and your donation would go to support some things that prisoners and ex-cons desperately need in order to reintegrate into society and to turn their lives around.
I have no connection to the Foundation; I just think they are hitting the exact right balance between justice and mercy.