This is so awesome it's what the word "awesome" is for: The Second Life community's fundraiser of $20,000+ for the Equality Florida's Victim fund is not only huge, right now it's the very largest grassroots, community-based donation on the GoFundMe crowdfunder page, and tenth highest overall. You can see for yourself when you go to the page and click the Highest/Most Liked/Recent toggle on the right.
That's an incredible achievement, considering the $7.8 million total raised so far and that the biggest donors are mostly comprised of individuals and corporations. To be sure, any contribution of any size is great, but the fact that thousands of people from all over the world whose only connection is being part of an online virtual world rapidly put together a series of impromptu events, set up dozens of donation boxes, and even put themselves up for auction -- it's just truly amazing and heartening. During such a fraught time fractured by so much anger and rage, a virtual community quickly collaborated, and got good things done.
Speaking of which, everyone please join me in thanking Casper Warden, the UK-based SLer who got the donation drive started, and volunteered so much of his time collecting donations through his system of boards, converting the Linden Dollars to US$, and sending it along to Equality Florida. If you were one of the donors, you already received screenshots confirming the Linden Dollar cash-out and the Paypal donation, but for the record, here's a copy of the latter below:
Look at all that beautiful money. Enough cash to pay a huge hospital bill, cover a whole year's worth of rent of a disabled victim, or put a victim's child through college. Would that this whole horrific hate crime had never happened at all, but among the few solaces is seeing how generous and supportive people spurred to help can truly be.
On that note, note that the GoFundMe drive is still taking donations, and is still short some $2.7 million of hitting the $10 million target goal. Go here to help get it over the top.
Thanks for the heads-up to Strawberry Singh, the Orlando-based, Muslim-American SLer who also did so much to drive awareness of this fundraiser.
Please share this post:
yay!!! was an honor to participate and win 2 ppl! i didn't win you hamlet but almost! ;)
Posted by: calllie cline | Wednesday, July 20, 2016 at 05:50 PM