CincyVoices Cares About Haiti [Updated]

Jan 14, 2010 by Loki

Well we were not going to debut the blog until this weekend, but I cannot in good conscience allow this subject to wait.

You see, I relocated here from New Orleans. Over the past four years before moving to the Queen City I was living surrounded by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the levee failure that followed it. After seeing everyone I know suffer the effects of the disaster there I can really feel for the people of Haiti. This is thrown into even sharper relief by the fact that Haiti, the poorest nation in the Caribbean donated $38,000 in American dollars for relief efforts in NOLA.

So today we will debut with something a bit more wide ranging than our intended Cincy-centric content. Today I would like to appeal to all of you to extend a hand to those less fortunate than ourselves.

I’m sure that you’ve been inundated, as have I, with relief requests from a wide variety of groups. Please take a moment before you donate to any of them and run their names through the Charity Navigator. You see there are a LOT of unprincipled bozos out there running scams, attempting to profit from the pain of our neighbors to the South. There are also a lot of charities where the money does not always go where it is supposed to.  This CBS expose on the Red Cross not distributing donations after 9-11 is an excellent case in point. Be careful when you give!

On the local level CincyBurb writes about donations being taken at Matthew 25 Ministries, where they are taking food donations in addition to the cash. [Info Here]

If you know of other efforts being made in the Cincy area please leave details in the comments so we can share them with the community. The ones that make it through a Charity Navigator check will be edited into this post for our readers’ ease of access.

This is not the way I wanted to launch this blog, but every time I look at the devastation I cannot help but think of my home town of New Orleans and the wreckage that still exists throughout the city. I’ve seen families ripped apart and houses reduced to rubble on a constant basis for the past four years until I moved to Northside. I cannot fail to help, I hope that some of you out there feel the same way.

[EDIT 01/15/10: We have removed the link to Yele, which was verified previously by another source, due to this article on the Smoking Gun. It seems they may not be as reputable as we believed. Better safe than sorry. -Loki]

Beginning with our next post we will be focused on purely Cincinnati based content.Pardon this off topic start, but as you can tell I feel strongly about this.

Coming Soon:

• Urban Sustainability in Cincy with Dark Martha
• Cincy Skate Scene News with Fickle Lew
• Local Photographers: dEj and The Criptress
• Random Ruminations by GeekJames and Loki
• Other contributors are being added steadily, if you’d like to be one of them contact Loki!

Thank you for reading!

-Loki, CincyVoices Founder