If nonprofits are rebuilding lives every day, the least I can do is keep their website from holding them back. I’m Petra Cutri, and I build them for free.

My Why: There’s a woman I know who spent fifteen years cleaning houses. She was good at it—built up a steady client base, had her routes down, knew exactly how long each job would take. But by year fifteen, her back ached. Every morning, she’d wake up dreading the day before it even started.

She wanted out, but didn’t know how. Cleaning houses was what she knew. It paid the bills. Starting over felt impossible.

I introduced her to CIELO—a nonprofit that offers workshops and support for starting a business. They were running a free childcare certification program and she signed up. They trained her, walked her through the state licensing process, helped her figure out the insurance, the safety requirements, and all the paperwork that would’ve buried her if she’d tried it alone.

Six months later, she opened an in-home childcare. Now she’s got got a waiting list of parents who want their kids with her. Kids love coming there. She’s doing work that doesn’t wreck her body, and she’s excited to wake up in the morning.

That’s what nonprofits do—they help people. They change lives.

Now, CIELO is an established nonprofit with a proven footprint and a great online presence, but most of other nonprofits are trying to do that kind of work with websites that look like an intern built them in 2017. No structure, no strategy, nothing that helps visitors take action. The site ends up slowing them down instead of lifting them up. 

I wanted to change that.