About helping DUers

It started, of course, with Andy. At least, that was the drive that I followed and contributed. However, if you remember, at some point Skinner halted any posts. The freepers claimed that it was a scam, even managed to halt payments from paypal, delaying the surgery by two weeks. And Skinner was concerned because of the amount of money that we raised in just one weekend.

And after that there were several very good posts about how such a drive should have been conducted. Of course, none of us are professional fund raisers. We just wanted to help, and we were led by sfexpat2000 and flyarm and there were enough people who knew Andy personally and vouched for him and the rest of us relied on their assurance.

I think that it will be great if we can get an ongoing fund here, in DU, to help individuals who all of a sudden are att the end of their rope. No, we cannot and should not help anyone long term. There are institutions, thankfully, that are there to help people long term.

But when someone loses a job, and facing a major illness and have no way to go - the DU fund should be there to help.

Many of us, naturally, wonder whether the specific cases are really that bad. And here I think that we need to be active.

Say someone from Spokane WA needs our help. We should be able to find another DUer from the same area who can volunteer to go visit that person and to confirm that, yes, help from DU fund is the only source to help this person.

This is the time of year that many of us open our hearts and our wallets to donate to worthy causes and I think that this was behind Skinner's thread to select a charity. But I think that this was going to be a one time deal. Perhaps I am wrong. And as many suggested their favorite charities, some of us realized that we need to take care of our own, first.

I am not sure how such an idea can be implemented. Similar to our donation to DU, I suppose. Instead of having individual paypal accounts - and I stay away from paypal - we can have Amazon and a snail mail address for such contributions. Someone will have to monitor the contributions and to determine who should be helped. But my main suggestion is to have such a fund running year around, and that someone neutral, perhaps even a CPA, should be in charge of it, clearly monitoring the inflow and outflow of cash. And have this person doing this pro-bono, of course. Perhaps we will need a few of them rotating.

And perhaps we need a special place, a forum or within a an existing forum, dedicated to our doing good. This way we will not have many threads on GD that quickly go to the next pages. It will be a place where we will know who need help and whether DU was there for them. There will be funds there so no need to scramble to raise money, we will know how much is there and will replenish it on a regular basis.

More or less...

There are a handful of DU'ers that I wouldn't care to help. Sorry. That is just the way it is.
I also don't think that DU should be involved in charity directly.
According to your plan of having it verified, how do you know that someone really isn't a freeper and wouldn't have a buddy that would "verify" the "story"?
Sorry I think this entire idea would lead to hard feelings.
HOWEVER...there are certain DU'ers I would bend over backwards to help.
I think the most DU should do is give people a forum to post their needs and then let people choose how they receive the money and let the others decide who they really want to help.
Let there be a disclaimer of buyer beware...if you want to give, give, if you don't...don't. The donations would be between the person giving and the person receiving.
Thats just my .02.

Even if we had a DU fund, there would probably be instances where the fund wasn't enough or somebody decided someone didn't qualify and others disagreed, etc etc. If somebody needs more help than we can muster up in a few days, then maybe an activist corps could leap into action to get longterm help. Otherwise, I just think people should help who they want, keeping in mind to never give more than they can comfortably afford to be cheated out of, both financially and emotionally.

Oh, and I've used Paypal for years and never had a problem. Amazon on the other hand, ick. So everybody has their own thing, which is why we should try to be as expansive as possible in whatever we do.

Thank you.

If you have any questions about the fund raising that DU does, please contact the admins at:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/contact.html

Thanks,
petersond
DU Moderator