Donations Surge for Progressive Causes After Trump’s Election
From smaller local groups to big organizations such as Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, nonprofit advocacy organizations around the U.S. reported fundraising hauls many magnitudes larger than in previous years during their end-of-year donation drives.
“This is always our big time of year, but this year it’s huge,” said Loretta Prescott, development director for the Immigration Legal Advocacy Project in Maine, quoted at The Guardian. “Instead of giving gifts, people are making donations to causes they believe in.”
The Guardian continues:
Planned Parenthood has received more than 300,000 donations in the six weeks since the election, 40 times its normal rate. Around half the donors were millennials and 70% had never given to the family planning organization before, a spokesman told the Guardian. …
The ACLU donations web page crashed the day after the election as visitors increased by 7,000%, and in the next five days it raised more than $7m from 120,000 donors. Now it says it has raised almost $23m from more than 300,000 individual gifts in just online donations. …
A new website encourages people to make donations to liberal causes not just in honor of Trump or Pence, but for some of their wildly controversial senior staff and cabinet picks.
The site, DonateBigly.com, is a wry take on one of Trump’s nonsensical sayings, where during the campaign he was being mocked for apparently inventing the word “bigly” as an adverb.
With tongue further in cheek, the website’s slogan is “small hands vs big hearts”, referring to the size of Trump’s hands, which became an election talking point. …
While famous national organizations are seeing a surge, Carol Tracy, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Women’s Law Project advocacy group, urged people to seek out local causes, too.
“State-based organizations are where all the action is. Everything is local in the end, and if it’s not working at that level then this election result is what we end up with,” she said.
—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly
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Source: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/donations_surge_for_progressive_causes_after_trumps_election_20161226/
