DONATE TO HAITI RELIEF THROUGH THE GEEKDAD GIVING PAGE!

We all know what has happened, and how desperate the need for medical resources is right now in Haiti. There are plenty of good avenues for charitable donations out there, and by no means to we mean to replace any of them, but all of us at GeekDad want to do our part as well. To that end, we have set up a donation page at First Giving in support of the medical relief organization MerlinUSA.

Merlin specializes in health, saving lives in times of crisis and helping to rebuild shattered health services. Merlin works within existing health systems to realize everyone’s right to accessible, appropriate, affordable health care. We are committed to helping build lasting health services which are used and championed by everyone. We are specialists in rapid medical response and rebuilding health systems, effectively taking countries from emergency to recovery. We are undaunted by the challenges of providing health care to vulnerable people living in the most difficult, forgotten and remote corners of the world.

We are determined to make health a global priority; giving people caught up in conflict, disaster and health system collapse the chance to lead healthy lives. We care or people at risk, for the lives of the people we work to save, and for the safety of our staff. We are accountable to our patients, partners, supporters and donors. And we keep our promise: to stay on, beyond the crisis, for as long as we are needed.

They were on the ground in Haiti in hours to help:

Merlin’s eight strong Emergency Response Team left on the first available flight to Haiti. Their initial task is to assess the most urgent needs, which are likely to be water, sanitation, shelter, disease prevention and restoration of basic health services. Our team is likely to concentrate immediately on distributing essential shelter kits, as well as medical equipment such as hygiene kits and blankets, supporting local health staff and mobilizing communities to ensure disease outbreaks are prevented. We are mobilizing all necessary resources now.

Now is your chance to donate to the relief effort (or donate again). Through our First Giving page, we hope to raise $15,000 in support of the relief efforts on the ground in Haiti. And as an incentive (not that we need any more than the desire to help people in a time of great need), for every $15 you donate, you’ll earn one change to win a geeky giveaway item. We’re still compiling the prizes, but to start we have a batch of seriously cool stuff from John Kovalic, and some rather significant gift cards from our good friends at ThinkGeek. This means we just need a thousand GeekDad readers to donate $15 each (but you’re welcome to donate more if you can).

UPDATE: The amazing John Kovalic has pledged that for every donation of $100 or more, he will send the donor an autographed and specially-doodled copy of the first Dork Tower compendium. How cool is that?!?!

DONATE TO HAITI RELIEF THROUGH THE GEEKDAD GIVING PAGE!

Logo © Rod Roddenberry

Lots of people sell off stuff that used to belong to their parents after their parents pass away. Some of those people, surely, donate the money they raise to worthy charities. But it’s safe to say that you haven’t ever seen an estate auction quite like this before, mostly because most people’s parents didn’t create and act on Star Trek.

Rod Roddenberry, who was Gene and Majel Roddenberry’s only child (Gene had two daughters from an earlier marriage), has decided to auction off some of his parents’ things to raise money for Haiti relief. Only a few of the items are overtly Star Trek-related; most of them are fairly prosaic. But I think it’s safe to say, for most geeks, a set of golf clubs (for example) does gain a certain amount of interest if you can honestly say that they used to belong to Gene Roddenberry.

There’s a wide variety of items, from a script of Majel’s lines as the ship’s computer for an episode of The Next Generation to several collections of assorted books. The auction is being run via Facebook comments, so you will have to have a Facebook account to bid. 100% of the auction’s proceeds are promised to go to HaitianHero.com (a site run by Jimmy Jean-Louis, better known as “the Haitian” on Heroes, and who is actually Haitian).

The auction is scheduled to end at 11:59 PST on Friday, January 29. New items are being added to it every day, so check back between now and then in case something new strikes your fancy.

United Nations Development Programme

As some of you may already know the OneBookShelf websites are raising money to help support the relief effort in Haiti and whilst GeekDad is doing it’s on drive for donations you can also head on over there and they will match every penny donated there by you.

For one day only what they have also done to encourage donations is to bring together publishers who have donated pdf’s that normally sell for over $1,000 and these will we given to anyone who donates $20. Again all money raised in this way will be matched by the folks at OneBookShelf and given to Doctors Without Borders. For those interested in what is in this package I’m informed that you can almost pick an RPG publisher and you’ll find something from them in there. Some of the bigger draws are MARS: Savage Worlds Edition, Thrilling Tales (SW), Apocalypse Prevention, Inc., Open Game Table, and Kobold Quarterly, among others.

I’m sure any GM will find something in the bundle that they will be able to use and it’s all for a good cause. And remember it’s only available until the end of the month so get in early.