Aral Balkan @aral@mastodon.ar.al
Public

Hi everyone,

I’ve just launched the Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal to get our remaining 8 families who are stuck in the danger zone in the North to relative safety in the South.

gaza-verified.org/emergency/

Based on conversations @joynewaccJoy and I have had with them to ascertain what they need (transport, land, tents), we have set the campaign goal at $15,000.

To kick things off, I’ve made a personal donation of $1,000.

These families are living in terror under nightly bombings by Israel. Please, if you can, help them survive Israel’s ongoing genocide. And please share this as widely as you can.

Thank you!

💕

PS. The donations are being collected by our not-for-profit, Small Technology Foundation and the entire sum, minus Stripe’s fees, will be transferred to the individual fundraisers of the families. We have suspended our own fundraising for Small Technology Foundation for the duration of the emergency appeal (small-tech.org/fund-us/).

PS. If you keep the campaign page open, you will see the progress meter update and donations coming in in real time.

Gaza Verified

Emergency appeal to get the Gaza Verified families stuck in the danger zone in the North to relative safety in the South.

gaza-verified.org

Aral Balkan @aral@mastodon.ar.al
Public

@joynewaccJoy Hi all,

Here’s today’s Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal Impact Report for Day 5:

Today, the $455.50 we had in the USD pot in Stripe that we were waiting for finally got transferred to our bank account.

To add to that, we got a $500 donation via bank transfer.

This morning, I withdrew €951.63 from the Stripe donation pot, clearing it. That got converted to $1,108.09.

Since the amount wasn’t enough for the two payments I wanted to make, I pushed the campaign a bit and you all responded like the absolute gems you are and I managed to withdraw another €794.51 from the pot. From this amount, I took the €200 we’d lent to yesterday’s payments from our own funds, bringing the total to €594.51. This got converted to $691.15.

So the total we had in the USD pot at the end of this was: $455.50 + $500 + $1,108.09 + $691.15 = $2,754.74.

From this, I also deducted the USD amount ($108.41) we had temporarily lent from our own funds yesterday so we could make the payments.

This left us with $2,646.33 to distribute today to:

• @ahmedosama: $600 for land, in addition to the $600 for a tent we had sent earlier.
• @mohshbairMohammed from Gaza 🍉: $2,000 for the remainder of transportation, land, and tent so they can evacuate South.

And, with that, we have paid out all the amounts that everyone in our 16 families had told us they needed from the start of the campaign on Saturday.

We currently have $46.33 left in our USD bank account.

I just checked Stripe and with new donations that have come in since my last withdrawal, we have €891.47 in there.

And the state of the campaign in general right now is that we have raised $34,233 out of our revised goal of $35,000 in the last five days and we have distributed $32370.42 to our 16 families to help them escape the bombs in the North to relative safety in the South.

This feels like a milestone.

We added four new families to Gaza Verified today and at least three of them are either trapped in the North or have family that is. I’m asking them for their needs now.

I’m leaving the goal at $35,000 for the moment but, as always, the more we have in the pot, the better we can respond to the needs of our families, so please keep sharing and helping out if you can.

Once we have the latest list of needs from our new families (and perhaps additional ones from our current ones), Joy and I will come up with a plan for evolving the campaign and the site. I am thinking we might archive the current week and start on a new week, again with singular focus on our families that need the most help in surviving Israel’s genocide in the here and now.

Words cannot express how much I love you all for stepping up and showing your love and solidarity for our families in Gaza and for welcoming them so warmly and with such humanity to the fediverse.

Thank you.

You give me hope.

💕

Screenshots of the Chuffed pages of Ahmed and Mohammed, showing donations for $600 and $2,000 from Aral Balkan. (The donation sites won’t let me put Gaza Verified or something like that in there, it needs to be a name.)Screenshot of today’s payment distribution spreadsheet showing that we have paid all of the requested amounts to all of the 16 families. It also, sadly, shows that we still haven’t been able to contact Ahmed Abu Ouda (and we are very worried).
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