Social Media can be Good (and Fast)

Tonight we witnessed something pretty amazing.

Those of us tuned into a handful of social media tools saw a good (and fast) example of community, caring, and giving.

A request on Twitter by David Armano (author of the Logic + Emotion blog) was simple:

 In part, here is how the blog post read: 

Daniela recently divorced her husband after years of physical abuse. In recent years her mortgage went unpaid and she's lost her house. As of this moment, Daniela's family is staying at our house and we are trying to help her find a one bedroom apartment for her family to live in.  With Evelyn, her youngest having Down's Syndrome and Daniela herself being a Romanian immigrant with very little family support she literally has no one to turn to. Except us (all of us).

Daniela cleans houses when she can leave her family. I'm not even going to tell you what she gets paid—it's obscene. Right now her options are pretty limited, aside from an apartment, there is only a group shelter. Not very pretty. 

Here's what we are asking. Right now, Belinda and I are opening our home, but it's tight as we have no basement. We've committed to giving as much as we can spare, diverting funds from other places.  I'm asking if you could think about doing the same. Or at the very least, helping get the word out about this. We are looking to raise 5k for Daniela and her family. Enough so that she doesn't have to worry about a deposit or rent for a while.

The Community Responds
In about two hours the original tweet had been Retweeted many times and the request spread on Twitter, it went to Digg, it started trending on search.twitter, and no doubt there will be multiple blog posts that spread or cover this phenomenon, and most importantly, they exceeded the $5K goal (as of this writing, over $9,000 had been rasied with more on the way.)

It is very hard to argue with results like this. We saw something very special tonight.
And it was just a Tuesday night.

Here's David Armano's Thank You video in response:

Related articles and links by Zemanta and Richie Escovedo

• Please Help Us Help Daniela's Family
• Blogger David Armano Uses His Network To Raise over $8,000 to help an out of luck family   
• Using Social Media for Good Causes
  
• Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense
• Safe Haven of Tarrant County