The FOH Army Wants You to Bet on Yourself—and Then Pay Your Winnings Forward

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A team of superheroes is typically a pretty exclusive club. There were seven original members of the Justice League. The roster for the Avengers is a little bigger at 15 heroes. And the Fantastic Four? True comic book fans know how many heroes were on that team (spoiler: it was four).

But there’s one team of heroes that’s always taking on new recruits, seemingly never maxing out in terms of membership. You don’t need to have been bitten by a radioactive spider or attend a special school for mutants to come onboard. In fact, all you really need if you want to join this team is a Twitter handle, a little free time, and a desire to open your wallet to help others.

To anyone who has ever viewed the Internet as inherently evil, consider the FOH Army, a collective of Twitter do-gooders armed with little more than a hashtag, a Venmo account, and an urge to pay it forward.

Its de facto leader is writer Shea Serrano, 40, who is kind of like Mother Teresa if Mother Teresa roasted J. Cole’s rap skills. ("FOH" stands for the decidedly un-Mother-Teresa-like "fuck outta here," a sort of rallying cry.) The group’s operation is simple: Serrano sends out a tweet to raise money for a cause or person by using the #FOHArmy hashtag. Then his followers Venmo cash to him or directly to the person in need.

Butch Rosser was one of those beneficiaries of the FOH Army’s kindness before he joined up as an active member.

"Back when I was homeless and then couch surfing, they had my back. Sometimes for weeks, whatever donations I got dictated what and how well I would eat," Rosser, 42, says. "I would vow back then that if I could survive this and make a better life for myself, I would be even better about giving back. FOH just makes it ridiculously easy to do so, and I probably trust a bunch of Internet randos more than 90% of American institutions."

Rosser credits the humility of the FOH Army’s founder as an underlying principle of the group.

“That's the thing about Shea he'll never say: his light is so bright even the fanbase refracted off it can shine enough to save lives, give scholarships to the deserving, feed a bunch of families or hype up Inside Man again because it's been a few weeks since we hyped up Inside Man,” Rosser says, “It's the meritocracy this country tells itself it is."

In only a few years, the FOH Army has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars; its good deeds range from the small (helping a teacher make a student-loan payment) to the midsize (raising more than $9,000 for a San Antonio girl’s quinceañera after her father died) to the holy-shit (raising more than $130,000 in one night for Hurricane Harvey relief in 2017).

Despite its enduring spirit of altruism, Serrano—who has over 425,000 Twitter followers as of this writing—wants you to know the FOH Army didn’t start as a "guerrilla philanthropy" group. It started, like most things start for Serrano, as a joke.

By 2015, Serrano had built a devoted following on Twitter thanks to viral blog posts for the website Grantland featuring headlines like "The Bad Guys Weirdness Index: Who Is the Strangest Baddie in Movie History?" and "The ‘If I Fought This Rapper, Would I Win?’ Chart." In between tweets about his beloved San Antonio Spurs, Serrano would use the platform to promote his book, The Rap Yearbook, by mobilizing his followers to try to get the book to sell out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online booksellers.

"Somebody then made the joke that we were like a shitty army just going around causing trouble, and then somebody else called it the FOH Army and that's how it got a name," Serrano, 40, says.

When Grantland closed and Serrano decided to start a free newsletter to keep writing in between books, FOH Army members offered to throw him a few dollars to support the project. But instead of keeping the money, Serrano decided to donate any money people wanted to contribute to the Genesis Women’s Shelter in Dallas, a place where Serrano’s collaborator on The Rap Yearbook, the illustrator Arturo Torres, had spent some time growing up because his mother was in an abusive relationship.

"Then we updated everybody on Twitter," Serrano says. "We were like, 'Hey, look, this what we do with the money, you idiots.' And we were like, that was pretty cool. So we said, 'Let's do it again,' because people were asking again to donate money."

One collective action turned into another. And then another. And then another. As Serrano was pushing his Twitter followers to "shoot your shot" and "bet on yourself," he’d drop links or Venmo handles to help crowdfund for various causes. When Serrano put out a call to his followers that he was donating the $31 in his Venmo to "a place"—not specifying where—and that they could Venmo him money to supersize the donation. 24 hours later, Serrano and the FOH Army had raised over $25,000 for the Martinez Street Women’s Center in San Antonio.

FOH Army member Drew Waddell, 45, calls Serrano "the true expression of chaotic good on the internet." The spontaneous, random nature of FOH Army fundraising actions is part of what makes them so fun.

"When the mood or the cause strikes, he asks for everyone to band together to help," Waddell says. "There's no overhead, there's no non-profit at work that has staff, it's a straight line from your wallet to a cause that needs the money."

Serrano, to his credit, is not some ivory tower philanthropist tossing money indiscriminately around to those in need. He shared that the underlying motivation for any FOH Army action comes from an intimate understanding of what it’s like to be poor, having grown up on government assistance. "I know what it feels like when you can't pay a bill or [need to] scrape by on food for the next week or so before the little food stamp booklet gets here."

His passion for helping also comes from his experience as a teacher, a job he had for nine years before shooting his shot to become a professional writer. "This is a way to fill that bucket," Serrano says. "To me, it’s a less meaningful version of it because I don't get to see it. It's just me typing into my phone and then transferring [money] or posting a link on Twitter. But it helps with that a little bit. It's that same sort of feeling."

And though sending a one-off donation may feel like a small act of paying it forward, Nicole Palafox Gamat, 32, says there’s something special about becoming a part of the FOH Army.

"Honestly, it feels like helping out family, which is such a weird thing to say about internet friends," Palafox Gamat says. "We're in a weird time and place where the internet is normally just filled with doom and gloom, but pop over to Shea's Twitter and the people and causes he helps out with directly—it just feels really good to see humanity on a smaller scale. And I like to think that if you ever need anyone, are feeling down, or counted out, the FOH Army is really just a click away."

CHANGE A LIFE NOW

Follow @SheaSerrano and #FOHarmy on Twitter. Set up a Venmo account. Then wait for the FOH Army to rally...

A version of this story originally ran as "Find the Good—Even on Your Social Media" in the December 2021 issue of Men's Health.

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