24 Hours to Help Refugees

A honeymoon, a refugee camp — and a lifetime of impact

Ethan Zohn has done a lot in his life: played pro soccer, won Survivor, hosted his own travel show, started a youth health and leadership organization, survived cancer (twice!) and so much more. While that’s enough for most people’s lives, Ethan’s just getting started. For instance, he got married earlier this year.

July 16th was one of the happiest days of my life — my wedding. As my beautiful bride, Lisa, was walking down the aisle toward me…on the exact same day on the other side of the world, we knew that hundreds of Syrian families were walking toward a refugee camp in Greece. They were being evacuated, once again and shuffled around a country that is not their own. — Ethan

This group of about 1,200 refugees who had just been transferred to a camp near Thessaloniki were mainly women and children who had been separated from their husbands and fathers when Greece’s borders closed earlier in the year. But while the situation was dire, there was still optimism to be found in humanity.

A group of volunteers heard their cry and decided to help. They created a safe haven called EKO Project which provides a school, communal kitchen, and welcoming place for children to play. This project is a place of hope to refugee children and their parents who are trying to rebuild their lives.

As soon as the newlyweds learned about this group, they decided that they had to help. Not having been able to land on an idea for a honeymoon, they loved the concept of a alternative honeymoon — one in which they could help others. Rearing to go, Ethan got in touch with the team at CrowdRise.

So for our honeymoon, we decided to go Greece with the CrowdRise 24-Hour Impact Project. We want to give these kids the freedom to play, learn, grow, and live a full life.

Earlier this week they landed in Vasilika refugee camp in Greece. They set an initial goal of $20,000 to support the work of EKO Project. To best show the immediate needs, they laid out the most pressing issues facing the people in the camp:

• School — Kids come everyday to EKO Project to learn English, Spanish, and German so they can be fluent when they are (hopefully) relocated.
• Winter Clothing — Coats, boots, gloves, hats, and socks. Winters are cold in Greece, and snow is fast approaching.
• Soccer — The most unifying sport on the planet. We’ll provide soccer uniforms and balls.
• Food — EKO Kitchen serves breakfast to refugees every morning. The food inside the camp is minimal and packaged. This is their only access to fresh, healthy, and warm meals.
• Building — EKO is built by hand by volunteers. Wood, saws, ladders, drills, hammers, nails are needed to expand the space and insulate.
• Library — Refugee children are so eager to study. The war in Syria started 6 years ago, so many have never attended school. They are desperate to learn to read and write.
• Relocation Support — EKO helps facilitate family reunifications and legal paperwork. Volunteers also assist with administrative needs and create a plan for the future.
• Refugee Wishlist — The most requested items in a refugee camp are cooking oil and chai tea. We will distribute these little gifts of hope from tent to tent.

So now with the needs laid out, they had 24 hours to raise $20,000. To achieve this lofty goal in just 86,402 seconds, they emailed everyone they knew, they leveraged social media (yes, that Olivia Newton-John), they blogged on Huffington Post, they wrote about it for a soccer magazine, they got press — in short they went all out for this project. This video was the focal point of all the outreach.

Amazing, right? Well it worked, because they hit their original goal of $20,000 in under 8 hours. So they raised it to $30,000 to help with ongoing support for EKO Project. And hit that one in 11 hours. The community supporting the fundraiser wound up donating over $44,000 to help these 1,200 refugees stuck at Vasilika.

But now that the day of fundraising was over (and more successful than anyone could have envisioned), next up was the real work: the impact.

The work was fast, hard and so worth it. Side-by-side with EKO Project, Ethan and Lisa were busy providing fresh meals for the kids, delivering food and supplies to the families in the camp and getting them to reengage in play by holding an epic soccer match.

And because everything was being recorded and reported back to donors in real-time, the people who supported the 24-Hour Impact Project saw the immediate impact that their financial contribution made to improving the lives of these 1,200 refugees. Check out all the impact in this video.

Amazing stories like this show the power and the impact that people can have on the world. There are so many Decent Humans out there that just want to help and do good in the world — often you just need to ask.

The CrowdRise 24-Hour Impact Project demonstrates the incredible power that real-time impact and crowdfunding can give to an individual trying to make change in the world. CrowdRise ambassadors are selected to find an important cause and in just 24 hours raise the funds to make a change. They then spend the following 24 hours implementing that change. All activity is filmed in real time and video updates are posted so that donors can see the immediate result of their contributions. To see all the 24-Hour Impact Projects, visit crowdrise.com/impactproject.

Decent Humans is a series of stories spotlighting the incredible community we witness on CrowdRise doing amazing things for good. By sharing their stories of aid, altruism, and passion we hope others will be inspired to live a charitable life.