Whenever tragedy strikes, people around the world often seek out ways to help victims as they watch the news unfold on their screens.
When 19 children and two teachers were killed in a May 24 school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, millions of dollars began to flood into a city with no preexisting plan on how to manage or disperse the donations. That’s when the National Compassion Fund, an organization dedicated to giving 100% of donations to victims of tragedies, stepped in to assist in collecting and distributing the money from the many fundraisers that popped up following the shooting.
Jeff Dion, executive director of the National Compassion Fund, which has administered funds in a number of other cases, said that many city agencies don’t have a plan for how to manage this kind of influx of money in the case of an emergency. Uvalde was one of them, Susan Anderson, Uvalde director of planning and city development, told ABC News.
The memorial for the massacre at Robb Elementary School, June 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas.
Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images
This leaves them vulnerable to a host of issues, including scammers trying to take advantage of the tragedy.
“In their emergency management plan, every community has a plan about how to deal with a mass casualty event, but they don’t have something in there about how you deal with these donations,” said Dion. “We know this happens, because it happens every time.”
Anita Busch, co-founder of the National Compassion Fund,…
