November 6, 2014;International Business Times
In a precedent-setting move, Facebook has placed a donate button on its home page to raise money for three charities working on Ebola. The money raised by the Donate button will go to the International Medical Corps, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and Save the Children.
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In addition, Facebook has promised to deploy 100 satellite Internet hotspots to the West African nations affected by the Ebola outbreak to improve communications. “These units will provide connectivity in places where there is no coverage,” said Chris Weasler, Facebook’s head of spectrum policy and connectivity planning. “In other cases, [they will be] adding more capacity to networks increasingly strained from the influx of responders,” some of whom are now quarantined.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife have already donated $25 million to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, commenting in a post, “We need to get Ebola under control in the near term so that it doesn’t spread further and become a long term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades at large scale…We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome.”
Other organizations have created lists of organizations that can receive donations. These are often longer and a bit more comprehensive, such as the one published by Fidelity Charitable. —Ruth McCambridge
