Edward Norton - Norton Wants Young People To Volunteer For Charity

Actor EDWARD NORTON was inspired to launch his charitable social networking venture to encourage young people to get involved in fundraising for good causes.

The Fight Club star came up with the idea for CrowdRise.com, a website designed to help people organise fundraising events with ease, after running the 2009 New York Marathon and raising $300,000 (£200,000) for the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust.

And Norton hopes youngsters will follow in his footsteps and volunteer for charity now that there's a platform to make the whole process so seamless.

He tells WENN.com, "It's just a website that makes it really easy to do personal fundraising for any cause that you care about. It's not a charity itself, it's a place that makes it really easy to design a fundraiser for any cause that you care about.

"I had done a lot of fundraising and I had run the New York marathon last year and a lot of people asked us how we had set up this website to raise donations and things like that, so we realised we could probably make it so that anybody could do the same thing."

"I think people sometimes don't have a lot of money to give themselves but they want to give to causes they care about so we're hoping that it makes it easier, especially for young people who understand social networking and things like that, to use it as a tool to make an impact on the issues they care about."

Norton isn't the only celebrity involved in CrowdRise.com - the website is supported by Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell and Jonah Hill.