Bahoi · CauseMatch

A village
becomes a blueprint.

A diver swimming between coral formations on the Bahoi reef

Founder

Gin DeMaio

On a trip through Indonesia, I came across a small village whose way of life I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.

Bahoi · CauseMatch is what came of that.

Bahoi sits on the northern coast of Sulawesi. By most economic measures, it doesn't have much. What it has is a stretch of coral reef, a community that takes care of it, and a remarkable willingness to share what little it has — together.

When I arrived, the village was in the middle of something ambitious: building a shared scuba diving experience for visitors, designed so the income could lift the whole community. No one household could fund it alone — so every family contributed what they had. Boats and motors from one home, cooking and hosting from another, dive guides who knew the reef intimately, fishermen who could read the currents, kids who helped carry gear down to the shore.

It wasn't one entrepreneur or one NGO building this — it was the whole village agreeing to build something only the whole village could build. Here's how that came together:

The reef

One of the healthiest coral reefs in the region — protected for decades by the villagers themselves through traditional sasi practices.

The pooling

When the village decided to offer a scuba diving experience to visitors, no single household could fund it. So everyone contributed what they had — boats, time, hosting, fish, knowledge.

The lift

The income from that single shared experience supports the whole village — schools, clinic, and a community fund that keeps the reef under their care.

What I saw in Bahoi wasn't a charity project or an NGO. It was an economy of generosity. A whole community pooling time, skill, and care into something larger than any of them — and then sharing what came back.

From a village to a team

Our vision.

After coming home, our team gathered around one shared dream: to make purposeful work easily accessible and recognized. To honor people for what they contribute to their community — not for how much money they bring in.

Here's the tension we kept running into: people genuinely want to do good. They also have rent to pay. Most of us spend our days choosing between work that pays and work that matters — and "work that matters" usually loses. Bahoi · CauseMatch exists to close that gap. When you give your time here, you don't just feel good about it — you're reciprocated for it, in a currency that flows back into your own life through the marketplace.

We learned something else along the way. In conversation after conversation, people told us they'd love to get involved if they only knew where to start. That's why we built the assessment — because when a person is emotionally aligned with what they're doing, they're more likely to show up in a way that genuinely serves the people on the other side of it.

When the heart is in the work, both giver and receiver benefit greatly — whether that's a neighbor down the block, an organization across town, or a village across the ocean.

And so we built this.

Bahoi · CauseMatch is a digital expression of what I experienced in that village — translated into a platform where:

A community can keep track of the time and energy its members are actually contributing — every hour counts, every shift verified.
Anyone can offer what they have — a skill, a meal, a lesson, a service, a piece of work made with their hands — and price it in Time Hours.
Others can spend the hours they earned on what their neighbors offer — including, eventually, experiences as singular as a scuba dive in a village that built it together.

We borrow Bahoi's name because we borrow Bahoi's idea: that a community's collective time is the most honest currency it has, and that when you pool it well, even the smallest place can build something the whole world will want to be part of. And so we're giving the name a meaning it didn't have before — supportive community, the kind there hasn't quite been a word for.

What we believe

Time, honestly counted.

No volunteer hour disappears into thin air. Organizers verify. Hours are credited. A ledger keeps it all visible.

Causes you actually care about.

Our 18-question assessment matches you to 1 of 8 cause areas. Not by job title, by how you see the world.

A marketplace, not a charity.

Time Hours can be spent. You give an hour, you can receive an hour. Dignity goes both ways.

And so we call it

Bahoi/ bə-HOY /noun

Supportive Community

Not actually a word in Indonesian — it's the name of a village.
"Supportive Community" is our adaptation, based on what was experienced there.

Bring your community to Bahoi.

Whether you're a village, a neighborhood, a club, or a continent — the same model works. Start by joining.

Take the assessment

A villagebecomes a blueprint.