Days before Hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas, one nonprofit group had already set up major kitchen operations in two cities to feed those working or sheltering in harm’s way.
Does billionaire philanthropy necessarily involve breaking things in the name of disruption? If so, what comes next?
Puerto Ricans are “other” to the US, and the constant assaults of that positioning are unrelenting. Puerto Ricans know it, see it, feel it, and recreate it internally, with Loiza as the center of the poor, black other.
PECES exemplifies how everything connects to everything else. The relationships are the enabling and linking mechanisms: the understanding of who is in the community, who needs extra support, and what matters most. That native understanding of the place you’re in is critical in relief. The dynamics matter—and it’ll matter in the rebuilding.
The ongoing challenges of recovery to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico compel philanthropy to respond. But not all responses are the same. One approach is to support grassroots, community groups. The other is to reinforce existing service-based nonprofits. These approaches have very different equity implications.
Disaster recovery can take years, or even a decade. It’s long overdue for donors to align their giving with the need.
This week, the Rockefeller, Open Society, and Ford Foundations pledged their first five million towards the Puerto Rico recovery effort to support a just and sustainable recovery.
An Iranian-American journalist used the YouCaring crowdfunding site to raise support for last week’s earthquake survivors. YouCaring removed her page after she raised $2,000 in the first 30 minutes “because the country you provided is part of an embargoed region.”
As Give Directly tracks this latest effort, the results just might ignite a public debate in the US about how best to help people. And it just might be what we’ve been hearing from people in crisis all along: “Send money, not stuff.”
Five years after Sandy hit, the spirit of cooperation carries on. Two separate but related stories speak to this—the development of a partnership-based community land trust to provide permanently affordable housing citywide, and an effort in the Rockaways that has launched three worker co-ops, with more on the way.
