Canada Surrey Radio Station RedFM Raises $140,000 For Pakistani Flood Victims

Money to go to Canadian Red Cross


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A Surrey radio station raised $140,000 on Thursday to help aid victims of flooding in Pakistan.

RedFM president Kulwinder Sanghera said the money was pledged between 6 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. and the amount could go as high as $170,000.

The fundraiser was prompted by news of a lack of donations for the millions affected by the Pakistani flood.

The Metro Vancouver Sikh community has also stepped up with plans for a fundraiser Saturday.

“After hearing from the UN secretary-general (on the horrors he witnessed in Pakistan) and finding out that not too many people have been donating, we found it necessary to do something,” said Sukhminder Virk, spokesman for the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey.

The Sikh temple is inviting donors to drop off their pledges between 9 a.m. And 9 p.m. On Saturday Virk is hoping other gurdwaras will join the drive and a lump sum will be forwarded for the relief effort.

The local Sikh community raised $1.5 million for the Haiti earthquake victims but have no goal for the Pakistani appeal.

The Red Cross is also soliciting donations through its website and phone lines and nationally is aiming to raise $18 millions, said Vancouver spokeswoman Alice Lam.

She said she didn't have figures showing donations down compared with other disaster appeals, such as the Haiti or Chilean earthquakes, but said donations through the organization's online and text options have been increasing over the past couple of days.

“Definitely, every disaster is different and it's difficult to say why donations are either up or down,” she said.

She speculated because the monsoon rains are a predictable yearly event, as opposed to an unexpected disaster like an earthquake or tsunami, that could affect giving, as could the fact that the rains last for weeks

UNICEF has appeal for $47 million for urgent and immediate needs over the next three months and has so far received just a fraction of this number in pledges, according to its website.

The tsunami relief funds collected $1.5 billion in aid and Haiti received $1 billion in just four months.

A blog called the Charity Navigator listed several reasons why donors could be slow off the mark to help the 4.6 million affected by the rains, which is more than those whose lives were disrupted by the two earlier earthquakes and the 2006 tsunami put together, including donor fatigue, worries about government ineptitude or corruption and of terrorist groups fronting as charities, a lower number of deaths (under 2,000 compared with 10s of thousands in the tsunami and hundreds of 1000s in Haiti), minimal media coverage or just the fact that it's summer.

Large aid organizations, such as the Red Cross, UNICEF, Development and Peace and OXFAM are soliciting donations through their websites and some are working with partners. The Red Cross, for instance, has teamed with Rogers Communications by setting up a text option, where texting HELP to 4357 on your Rogers or Fido phone will automatically send $10 to the cause. Rogers has contributed $50,000 to the Red Cross.

Governments and ogranizations worldwide have already pledged $100 million to help Pakistan.



Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/news/Sur...lood+victims/3419552/story.html#ixzz0xCaWCsqm