This past Saturday, Piedmont families gathered to show their support for struggling families from Ukraine at a fundraiser and bake sale hosted by the Wildwood community to benefit the 1K Project (https://www.1kproject.org/). This established, volunteer-driven project passes donations directly to Ukrainian families in need to use as they see fit, with each $1,000 raised supporting a single family. Families from across Piedmont participated by contributing baked goods, flowers, crafts for sale, and direct donations totaling $5,600. That’s tantalizingly close to directly helping six Ukrainian families that are facing situations we shudder to imagine. We are deeply grateful to Piedmonters for their support and care for these families.
A contribution of $1,000 already raised is supporting a single mother of three named Viktoryia from the small town Snigurivka in southern Ukraine. She is using the funding to buy food and medicine for her family.
Snigurivka is about the same size as Piedmont, around 12,000 people. It’s close to the Black Sea and about equidistant (some 35 miles) from Kherson — the first city taken by the Russian army as they drove into Ukraine through Crimea — and Mykolaiv, another city that’s been destroyed. Per a Reddit verified video, it seems much of Viktoryia’s village was shelled to pieces two weeks ago and is now controlled by the Russian army. As of a few days ago, reports are that there’s no water or electricity.
To continue this initiative, the Piedmont community has banded together to establish a dedicated sponsor page with a $10,000 goal to support ten struggling families. As of now, $5,678 (and counting) has been raised. The fundraiser is still open — and we still hope to hit our target of $10,000. People can make their tax deductible contributions directly at https://1kproject.org/piedmont.
We hope that other Piedmont families — parents and kids — will hold additional fundraising events for this community initiative over the next month. The process is extremely simple: just collect donations and send them to Piedmont’s dedicated sponsor page. Your only limit is your creativity. Anyone interested can contact piedmont.helping.families@gmail.com, and we can talk you through the easy logistics.
More background from the overall $1K project:
- We helped more than 3,200 Ukrainian families with food, clothing and shelter
- We have raised over $3.5 million in the last four weeks
- More than 2,000 donors and sponsors have contributed to the project
- Yahoo! committed $450,000 to the project, and we are seeking support from more companies
- Bloomberg, TechCrunch, Business Insider and others wrote about our work
- Dan Primack’s Pro Rata drove close to $1M in sponsorships
All photos by Edit Kincses