FFRF’s charitable arm gives to UNICEF to help efforts in Somalia
Nonbelief Relief, a nonreligious humanitarian agency, is giving $10,000 to UNICEF for famine relief efforts in Somalia.
International aid officials recently announced that they are facing one of the biggest humanitarian disasters since World War II. Both drought and war have devastated Somalia. Up to four famines — in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria and Yemen — are breaking out at once, endangering more than 20 million lives, according to The New York Times.
“Those of us who are not religious care deeply about this world, our only world,” says Nonbelief Relief Director Annie Laurie Gaylor. “We appreciate UNICEF’s work in Somalia and nearby nations, and we want to help it save lives.”
Other donations made by Nonbelief Relief in 2017 include:
- $5,000 to the International African American Museum being built at the site of the Charleston, S.C., wharf where more than 100,000 enslaved Africans were brought through at the main port of entry in North America. The museum, expected to be completed by 2019, will illuminate their lives, history and descendants.
- $10,000 to Open Doors for Refugees (via Center for Community Stewardship), which has a $100,000 fundraising goal for 2017 to aid displaced Syrians and other refugees in Madison, Wis.
- $10,000 to the World Food Program (USA), affiliated with the United Nations, “where needed most to ameliorate starvation, hunger and malnutrition.” Many of the starvation “hot spots,” such as Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and Yemen have religion-based terrorism, warfare or disruption contributing to starvation, notes Nonbelief Relief. Last year, the charity gave the agency $20,000 for Syrian relief and $10,000 for relief in Sudan.
- $25,000 to the Women’s Medical Fund, co-founded by the late Anne Nicol Gaylor, who was the FFRF’s principal founder. The Women’s Medical Fund is an all-volunteer nonprofit based in Wisconsin and is believed to be the longest continuously operating abortion rights charity in the nation.
Nonbelief Relief was incorporated in 2015, with the Freedom From Religion Foundation as its sole member, and a board created to carry out the donations. It seeks to remediate conditions of human suffering and injustice on a global scale, whether the result of natural disasters, human actions or adherence to religious dogma.
Donations to Nonbelief Relief, which are deductible for income-tax purposes, may be made via FFRF by designating Nonbelief Relief in the donation dropdown. Your donation will enable Nonbelief Relief to continue to make humanitarian donations in the name of nontheism and freethought.
