jtfairbank

It's an unfortunate reality that we're going to exceed +1.5C, and we need to begin preparing for the consequences now. "Solving" climate change requires humanity to both prevent further warming AND take care of the people impacted by it. 10% of us could be forced to flee our homes by 2050...

In 2019 I founded Distribute Aid to develop community supply-chains that can support displaced people at scale. Since then, we've delivered $25M of aid between 100+ communities in 16+ countries. Given the size of the problem, and the need for rapid growth of successful solutions, we're taking a distributed approach that prioritizes local aid groups who are supporting displaced people. Everything is open-source of course!

If anyone wants to learn more / support us, please leave a comment or email me at taylor /at/ distributeaid.org. :)

We leverage partnerships with in-kind donors and shipping companies to get a lot of stuff for free. And of course there are tons of community groups gathering second-hand donations which we can send for free as well.

For example, there's a charitable factory making soap in Scotland. They give us a few hundred thousand bars of soap every 6 months or so, and we ship em out to 15+ refugee camps in Greece to ensure the hygiene of 100,000 people are met.

Our 2019 budget was $10,000...

I'm building supply chain & logistics tech at Distribute Aid. We help grassroots aid groups meet more needs, more consistently, and work together to gain efficiency at scale.

We deliver $100 worth of aid for every $1 we spend on operations. Literally a 100x return for humanity.

The need is there. The scale is there. But it'll never get VC funding for obvious reasons.

Did you read the article? Sounds like she didn't do anything wrong, but was sent falsified data by a more senior scientist that she trusted. After discovering that, she took steps to correct the record, alert other scientists that they need to double check their papers, and build automated tools to catch similar issues going forward. That sounds appropriate, and high in integrity, why should she be punished for doing the right thing?

They are big in the grassroots aid movement running important projects in multiple countries, but they aren't the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders big.

Hoping to get this resolved before they have to try and publicly call out Facebook, but you're right- that seems to be the only way to get tech orgs to take a minute to care about situations like these.

I was about to say, I've had no problems with PayPal after I moved to Serbia. Venmo on the other hand...

Have to agree. been really enjoying Elixir / Ecto / Phoenix.

I find Ecto lets me be as expressive as I need to with Queries, and handles the mapping into models very well for the 90% of easy cases that I need it to.

Don't have links on hand, but it changes from country to country. We started ours in Sweden, where my cofounder is from. It was pretty easy compared to the 503(C) process in the US: create a governing document, put together a board, hold your first meeting, apply for organization status, apply for charity status.

Happy to talk more if you want- my email is in my profile.

As someone who cares more about adventure than $$$ and just founded my own NGO, mad respect.

2014: -$10k - Founded a startup.

2015: $35k - Moved to SV, raised a small seed.

2016: $54k - Running my startup in SV.

2017: $60k - Remote contracting from Scotland.

2018: $25k - Remote contracting. Founded an NGO in Europe, almost all of my contracting money goes to supporting my work with that.

2019: $20k - Remote contracting + full time on my NGO. Living in Serbia to stay close to the action.