[Withdrawn] Fund raise for Hurricane Patricia Red Cross

[woodstockmerkle]

I realize this may be a controversial idea – but as Nu has broken ground in many ways, perhaps this will be another.

The devastation from hurricane Patricia will be immense. I fully expect there to be fundraisers by many aid agencies, including the Red Cross.

As Nu expands its reach and visibility, perhaps it can use its influence to help people in need.

The proposal:

Motion RIPEMD160 hash: draft

=##=##=##=##=##=## Motion hash starts with this line ##=##=##=##=##=##=

Upon successful passing of this motion, the BTC that was intended for following week’s NSR buyback, but not to exceed 5,000 NBT of value, will be donated to the Red Cross via Bitpay.

=##=##=##=##=##=## Motion hash ends with this line ##=##=##=##=##=##=

Verify. Use everything between and including the <motionhash></motionhash> tags.

The Red Cross is not perfect. Bitpay is not perfect. But if this is successful, I’m sure we can refine it, and perhaps use Nu as a vessel to connect people with vetted aid agencies that do good in the world. (For whatever the definition of ‘vetting’ and ‘good’ are.)

[tomjoad]

I think this is an idea that is in line with the original vision for the Winston Fund, which regrettably took a back seat to more pressing concerns for our network in early 2015. So, I think it’s a great idea.

Rather than diluting shares though, why not pass a motion stating that one week’s worth of share buyback funds should be used for charitable relief to the Red Cross? The past week saw about 3000 USD used for buybacks - an amount that would help a lot of people.

[zoro]

i like tomjoad’s suggestion. I think that 625 nbt is a small amount considering NU’s status
Moreover we could also pass a grant about it!

[Hyena]

All I see here is to pay for marketing. There are other ways to pay for marketing. Paid articles about nubits, for example. If we support this then we must generally support paying for marketing like typical pump and dump scamcoins do. Red cross or not, it doesn’t matter, since they are all the same – corrupt and unreliable. We are lucky if 10% of the donation goes to the people who actually need it. 90% will “disappear” on its way.

edit:
Not to mention that those hurricanes are a direct and intentional result of geoengineering.

[tomjoad]

Red cross or not, it doesn’t matter, since they are all the same – corrupt and unreliable.

International relief organizations have saved millions of lives across the globe, and step in to disaster areas when others won’t. If shareholders had an aversion to Red Cross, we could look at UNICEF, Oxfam, Save the Children, or any number of trusted organizations. Condemning them all as corrupt is needlessly cynical. You can get detailed independent analysis of funding effectiveness for many top charities at websites like https://www.charitywatch.org/top-rated-charities. For every Susan G. Komen there’s a dozen excellent organizations.

I didn’t get the impression that @woodstockmerkle wanted to do this as a paid marketing stunt. Rather, he recognizes that Nu was created to be a more peaceful form of advanced money that can help people. A donation to help suffering people seems in line with our guiding philosophy, at least as I understand it. I think it would be a noble decision if shareholders voted to fund relief efforts.

EDIT: Hurricane Patricia weakened significantly and it seems that the country escaped mostly unscathed. I think the sentiment of this idea is still appropriate for future disasters.

[Hyena]

I am categorically against giving donations to big phat “charity” organizations if the goal was to “do good” in the world and not just marketing and getting positive media attention. This does more bad than it does good. Just because you have good intentions does not mean you will make the world a better place. Quite the opposite, to be honest. You are being naive.

However, I am not against helping the ones in need. It has to be done in a way that the results could be verified by us. When throwing your money to the sinkhole aka. “charity donations” you have no way of knowing where your money actually ends up. I would require a fair voting of custodians who would personally deliver the help to the hurricane victims, take selfies and other evidence with the victims and post them online, with references to the help receivers so I can check if they were real people and actually got the aid, no matter how small the aid was.

[tomjoad]

When throwing your money to the sinkhole aka. “charity donations” you have no way of knowing where your money actually ends up.

https://www.charitywatch.org/top-rated-charities

Charity Navigator - Your Guide To Intelligent Giving | Home

Top Charities | GiveWell

All are impartial independent organizations that provide detailed funding breakdowns of different charities to show where donations will be most effective. I’m interested if you disagree with their ranking methodologies. For example, with Charity Watch:

Groups included on the CharityWatch Top-Rated list generally spend 75% or more of their budgets on programs, spend $25 or less to raise $100 in public support, do not hold excessive assets in reserve, have met CharityWatch’s governance benchmarks, and receive “open-book” status for disclosure of basic financial information and documents to CharityWatch. Please see the Criteria section of the website for more information on the rating criteria and methodology that CharityWatch adheres to.

I don’t think it’s naive to realize there are many people in the world doing effective work with charitable/relief organizations.

[Hyena]

Depends how we look at it. There’s an unknown chance that the donated money will end up in the wrong hands. I am not willing to take that unknown chance. You are. So we agree to disagree. Also, a site such as charitywatch.org smells awfully like a fertile ground for more corruption — criminals defending other criminals. Who watches over charitywatch? If you want to help, go help personally. Don’t be a lazy slob sitting on your pile of money and throwing it to the middle men. Charity organizations are just another form of middlemen. I hate middlemen. That’s why I love bitcoin. They are a form of centralization and thus cannot be tolerated. It would be incompatible with DACs such as Nu anyway.

[tomjoad]

Also, a site such as charitywatch.org smells awfully like a fertile ground for more corruption — criminals defending other criminals. Who watches over charitywatch?

https://www.charitywatch.org/about-charitywatch/mission-goals/3113/3117
https://www.charitywatch.org/about-charitywatch/charitywatch-difference/3113/3118
https://www.charitywatch.org/about-charitywatch/board-staff/3113/3146
https://www.charitywatch.org/about-charitywatch/criteria-methodology/3113/3147
https://www.charitywatch.org/about-charitywatch/faq/3113/3115

I’ll leave it at that. If you choose to educate yourself on it, you might find that the entire world isn’t always a conspiracy.

[Nagalim]

There’s a lot of truth in not trusting centralized organizations. There’s also a very good case to be made that Nu can use a decentralized core to interact with centralized organizations in a coherent manner. We can’t necessarily do everything, especially when we exist in a world that already has so many structures built. I’d love to formalize a method of decentralized aid relief, but we have a lot of other things on our plates right now and donations could be a good way to show not only that we care, but that we have the ability to monetize our concerns.

[Hyena]

And where exactly do they explain why it is impossible for them to be(come) corrupt as well?

[Gilbert]

How many billions we want to spend on saving the world? There are thousands of charities. Hundreds of disasters each year. We can also start a religion: Nu saves the world. And after work we can beg: Help Nu to make charities rich. If we start with donations, then write us millions of children with cancer love letters.
If Nu start with donations, then good night. If I want to give my money away, then I do not need Nushares.
A democratic vote on fundraising would expropriate the minority.

[Cybnate]

Although this fundraiser sounds noble, I’m not supporting it (and similar fundraisers in the future) on an ad hoc bases and certainly not just to make us look good. One of the issues in the world is that people only respond when there is a disaster or something is happening in their backyard and that is usually too late.

In most cases (not all) it would have been cheaper and easier to prevent these disasters in the first place e.g. by not having people living in extremely vulnerable areas to disaster or e.g. in Japan/Tokyo (earthquake building codes and expensive ‘swinging’ buildings) or the Netherlands (dykes to keep the water out) spend a lot of money to keep them save from the local risks. I hear you thinking easier said that done and I realise that but we have to do better than we have been doing in the last 50 years donating to random charities who only receive funds when there is a disaster and apply a temporarily bandaid still leaving them vulnerable for the next disaster.

Sometimes these things need to be driven more by facts than by emotions. Where we can spend our dollar to support others effectively with a long term effect? Task of governments? They are clearly not up to the task. Just start to think the amount of money which has been donated to ‘Africa’ in the last 50 years with only very limited and temporary local results. It is only getting better slowly due to some ‘oversight’ as Tom is referring too and funds like the Gates Foundation which are completely independent, but there is long road to go.

I liked the Winston Fund as it was about supporting long term goals and motivating people to collaborate in a free thinking space among other goals. I hope we can revisit this when Nu starts doing even better than now.

[irritant]

best would be if resources could be sent directly to the people, without any financial incentivized organisation in the middle, of course this is an utopia when the infrastructure has been destroyed (need interwebs), the incentive for the global charity organizations now is actually to create disasters instead of prevent, like some news are creating the news just to get more viewers. Maybe some DAO should be created to replace the current old school charities. Poorest areas are hit hardest, which is sad, because they have done the least to cause (eg. global warming)

[cryptog]

I also think that most well known charity organizations take most of the money, which never reaches the affected areas or people.
The intention of this thread is correct and positive but I think also that we should think about better ways and more efficient ways to do marketing.

[Hyena]

[Gilbert]

If … in long term … i like mikrokredits like kiva.org
"Make a loan to an entrepreneur across the globe for as little as $25. Kiva is the world’s first online lending platform connecting online lenders to entrepreneurs"
There groups can join together to jointly lend. This would also be an advertising effect for Nu, because we could use the name Nu. Finally, Nu would get a little interest. And we could exploit the positive effects of Nubits. (Fast and stable) All people need is a mobile phone. You could even pay wages with Nu.
We would help people create jobs. This is better than to give away corn.

[woodstockmerkle]

So far the death toll stands at zero. As such, this does not seem to be a level of catastrophe seen in similar situations, and I will be withdrawing this motion.

An LA Times article captures the current situation: http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-patricia-manzanillo-20151025-story.html

Many interesting points were made in the discussion above, including:

• A spirit of philanthropy underlies what Jordan Lee outlined in the Winston fund
• Nu should not be spending money on philanthropic efforts at all
• Nu should be philanthropic, but in proactive efforts, not reactive ones
• Nu can be philanthropic and leverage current centralized organizations; there needs to be a way to interface with centralized organizations, until their decentralized counterparts are manifest
• Nu should spend money on philanthropic efforts if we can control the funds directly and have some way to hold the receivers of philanthropic funds to account

And to assert my point-of-view – my intention is not about driving publicity, but finding a way to do more good in the world.

It may end up being that the best solution would be a new distributed org, like how B&C was established, to provide an infrastructure for this good work, perhaps empowered by a subset of the members that make up the Nu DAC.

Voting for charities or raises seems to be similar to the motions, grants, and custodians logic that is in Nu and B&C.

Exactly how that would interact with the Nu ecosystem (NSR/NBT, etc), is among many things to be determined.

[Cybnate]

If … in long term … i like mikrokredits like kiva.org"Make a loan to an entrepreneur across the globe for as little as $25. Kiva is the world’s first online lending platform connecting online lenders to entrepreneurs"

Nu can be philanthropic and leverage current centralized organizations; there needs to be a way to interface with centralized organizations, until their decentralized counterparts are manifest

I have explored this earlier when Winston fund was presented, but the interface between Kiva and Nu is the hardest part. Only a public trustworthy custodian would be able to do that. Not very decentralised unfortunately.

[Hyena]

I know this topic is sort of dead already, but I just stumbled on this:
http://thespiritscience.net/2015/10/31/red-cross-built-only-6-homes-for-haiti-with-half-a-billion-dollars-in-donations/