Ed Norton has been talking some trash. And we're not standing for it anymore.
What's the deal?
Ed got together with Shauna Robertson and the founders of Moosejaw to create Crowdrise, a wildly successful crowdsourcing platform to raise charitable donations in creative ways. Nothing wrong with that.
Until the Mozilla Firefox Challenge.
Mozilla Firefox will give $50,000 dollars to the Crowdrise fundraiser that raises the most money for their nonprofit cause by the end of tomorrow, January 10.
If Comfort the Children International wins, we're going to use the $50k donated by Mozilla Firefox to power our life-changing education programs for children in Kenya. Every day, Comfort the Children works to empower Kenyan communities to create sustainable change and solutions to lift themselves out of poverty.
Sure, we're definitely honored to be taking part and competing in something meaningful and fun with people like our friends at Pencils of Promise, Sophia Bush, Jonah Hill, F-Cancer, Will Ferrell and many others. Including some fruit bats.
Everything was cool until Norton started coming in hot.
"It's going to be especially fun when I smoke past Kimmel and take the lead," is what Ed apparently had to say. Not cool.
This is where you come in. Help us win a whole lot of money for nonprofit Comfort the Children International by raising more money than everyone else. We. must. beat. everyone.
If you donate $33 to Comfort the Children on Crowdrise, you'll be entered to win a chance to get five VIP Green Room passes to Jimmy's show, a little program on community access cable called Jimmy Kimmel Live. And if that's not enough, you also win the right to have Jimmy punch the friend of your choice in the stomach.
That's right, any friend. In the stomach. For the children.
Jimmy's fiancée Molly actually volunteered with CTC for three summers in Kenya, so Jimmy has seen up close how the programs work and the real people being helped.
Zane founded the organization a decade ago when he purchased a one-way ticket to Kenya that changed his life. Over the past ten years, he's spent over half his time living in Kenya, working hand in hand with local communities.
CTC's initiatives focus on education, environment, economy, health and development that directly impact the community as a whole. Our programs are delivered through local relationships, creating the foundation necessary to make lasting changes, while ensuring that donations of time and money have a maximum positive effect.
CTC empowers the people it helps with job creation, not handouts. The volunteers live in and are fully invested in the community. They offer the tools and skills training needed to create sustainable change in an area that desperately needs it.
CTC realized early on that often development can be an unequal exchange from the development organizations to those needing the help. One unintended outcome of some "aid" or "development" is it can build a culture of dependency. Or, when budgets or priorities shift and the nonprofit leaves the community, the programs collapse.
Comfort the Children is different. We want to create a new culture of empowerment where the exchange is mutual between the development organization and the communities served.
When CTC started our first school for children with special needs in 2007, we quickly realized we were running out of money to fund the program. Our ambition was bigger than our bank account as a social entrepreneur startup.
"What can we do?" was our first question and the second was, "What if we could sustain the school by creating jobs for the children's mothers at the same time?"
We created L.I.F.E Line, a job program that hires mothers of special-needs children to make handcrafts and retail products. CTC sells the products to our partners like Whole Foods, which then enables the women to earn a steady income. That simple idea birthed from desperation has created over 400 jobs this past year and over half a million dollars in sales.
So the next time you're buying your kale, you can rest assured you're doing something to help other people.
But don't stop at the kale. Let's do this. Please donate $33 to Jimmy's Comfort the Children Crowdrise campaign and win the opportunity to get punched in the stomach by Jimmy. We're in the final push -- whichever group raises the most by 11:59pm EST tomorrow, January 10, will win the $50,000, funding we know will make an incredible impact in Kenya.
Please, don't let us get beat by fruit bats. Give now at: http://www.crowdrise.com/jimmy