Disaster Relief Fund Update - 02.03.2023
Phase II
Three weeks have passed since the destructive earthquake hit southeastern Turkey on February 6.
In the first week of the earthquake, survivors were desperately looking for their loved ones under the rubble. They were in need of search & rescue teams, heavy machinery, emergency shelter, water, food, clothes and hygiene products. Therefore, our first response was sending the urgently needed supplies including water, food and hygiene products to the region through municipality channels. Government officials, on the other hand, were so busy centralizing the supply chain and rescue efforts that they, so to say, almost forgot to send shelter, machinery and human power to the victims.
During the second week, some survivors found their deceased relatives while others lost their hope of even finding the dead bodies of their loved ones. The earthquake turned into a massive disaster because of coordination failures. We had everything, but were not able to effectively distribute the supplies to the people in need. Based on discussions with our friends on the ground, we decided to help the people who were leaving the region to find shelter in other cities, as well as some animal rescue NGOs. We allocated a portion of the funds between a rent pool designed to help homeless victims by paying their rents for some months, and two animal NGOs.
Since we have been living in Turkey for long enough, we had our own estimates as to what would come next in this long recovery period, right from the start. And very unfortunately, our concerns that the humanitarian aid targeting the region would decrease over the upcoming weeks came out right. People are getting used to disasters, coordination failure prevails as the Moloch takes control of numerous efforts based on good intentions, and the officials’ vision is getting more short-sighted each day. Amount of supplies donated to the region, including mainly hygiene products, food and water, is diminishing.
Tent camps are being erected here and there, but they do not even seem to possess the basic comfort meeting the humane needs. We are already witnessing the failing plumbing systems, lack of medicine, lack of mental health support, improper kids care and many more issues about which we are not informed yet.
BanklessDAO's mission and expertise mainly covers onboarding of individuals and communities to web3. Yet, this does not mean that we can not create a positive impact on the ground. What we can do primarily is to support the NGOs which have a direct impact across the region. We can guide them to create projects on different platforms for fundraising while directly donating to specific projects they would present.
Engagement with ANKA Relief initiates to support and assist NGOs to be onboarded as part of consolidated aid plans
ANKA Relief is consolidating the aid efforts within the crypto community as a support network, assisting as many NGOs and other initiatives as possible with the possibilities of accepting crypto donations.
With a shared objective of helping NGOs, we are engaged in talks with ANKA Relief about establishing a DAO and distributing a certain percentage of the raised funds as “micro grants” to the NGOs that are onboarded. The overall aim is to encourage NGOs to look for funds across the web3 ecosystem using our initial micro funding as a catalyst.
We started curating a list of NGOs which can be onboarded as part of the aforementioned plans, and started contacting them. A small, limited number of NGOs are planned to be invited for a test run.
We encourage our donors to join discussions in our discord server. https://discord.gg/cJeuzKUp
Our direct donations will continue next week as planned.
You can donate to our campaign from this link : giveth.io/project/banklessdao-turkey-disaster-relief-fund
or you can donate to the matching round to start a quadratic funding round for all the campaigns helping Turkey and Syria on giveth : https://giveth.io/project/earthquake-relief-qf-matching-pool