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Batteries Included

[Six months ago today, Sandy hit Long Island. Two weeks of no power, no heat and being displaced left me a little worse for wear. But I didn’t have as bad as others. What follows is a piece that was published in The Magazine shortly after Sandy, after Leah (ohheygreat) and myself took on a project that was kind of all consuming but worth it. I post it here because The Magazine is subscription only, but they are kind enough to let us repost our stuff after a while]

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“Do you realize how close it is to Christmas?” my friend Leah Reich text messaged from California.

I didn’t. I was too preoccupied being cold and miserable in my parents’ house, where my immediate family and I were staying after losing power at our own home during the first few hours of Superstorm Sandy. Eleven of us across three families had already been hunkered down there for a week and a half when a snowstorm hit, causing my parents to lose power too. Heat, hot showers, and normalcy would have to wait.

Leah’s message snapped me out of the funk I was in. I was feeling helpless to contribute meaningfully to those around me who were worse off. Neither my house nor my parents’ had suffered much damage, and none of us had been injured. I wanted to go out and do something for those who had been hit harder, but I didn’t have enough gas in my car to get anywhere, let alone to wait on the hours-long gas lines.

Meanwhile Leah, a coast away in Oakland, was trying to lend Sandy victims a helping hand by arranging a blood drive. Her efforts sputtered through logistical problems beyond her control. We were both looking for a way to help, and the nearness of Christmas gave us a focus.

Our goal became instantly clear with her text: We could leverage our Internet savvy to make the holidays a little less traumatic for children whose lives had been disrupted by Hurricane Sandy.

Sacks for Sandy, a toy drive for dispossessed kids, was born.

“When I saw what Occupy Sandy was doing with the Amazon registries, it occurred to me we could do something similar with toys and wish lists,” Leah recalls. “After all, what kid hasn’t made a wish list at the holidays?” We set up an Amazon wish list containing toys and games for all ages, in all price ranges, with the gifts coming to my house.

Because I had been only skimming the news with a spotty Internet connection post-Sandy, I had assumed that the aftermath was a local story and that no one was paying much attention to it. It turns out the world was watching. And they wanted to help. We found a way to let them assist.

Powerful while powerless

About four years ago, Twitter put me on a “recommended user” list, and from that I gained a million followers. That’s down to about 915,000 now, which is still a staggering number of people potentially reading my timeline each day. My normal shtick is cracking jokes and ranting about sports, and Leah and I had become friends through that banter. My high number of followers has had little practical use in my life and career, aside from bragging rights, but now I finally had the opportunity to use my reach for good.

Leah and I turned to social media to jumpstart our efforts. We put feelers out on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook — just a hint that we were about to launch this fundraiser for the youngest of Sandy’s victims. The response was immediate and powerful, and it came from all over the world. The tweets about Sacks for Sandy went from chatter to outright buzz. We were retweeted by Internet luminaries and celebrities like Anil Dash and Neil Gaiman.

We eventually lost track of how many people were spreading the word about the toy drive, but I was reminded of the scale of participation by the new stack of Amazon boxes in my living room when I got home from work each day.

We once again turned to social media to create a persistent home for Sacks for Sandy. People quickly stepped up to help. Michael Owens of San Francisco volunteered to design the website for us. Hosting Matters gave us the domain sacksforsandy.com. Cori Johnson made illustrations for the site. My sister volunteered her time to help maintain the wish list, adding more toys and keeping count of what was bought so we could update the website regularly and tweet the progress of the drive.

Over 50 people volunteered to wrap the gifts. The Nassau County Firefighter’s Museum offered their space to host a wrapping party and to store the gifts, which led us to work with local fire departments to use their stations to distribute presents. With Skype and FaceTime, we were able to keep Leah front and center for all the action, even introducing her to volunteers during the wrapping sessions.

We then contacted Patch, an online-only hyperlocal news service with individual sites for hundreds of communities. When a reporter from my town’s Patch came to my house — now filled with toys, games, and books — Leah took part in the interview via Skype. The 3000 miles between us melted away.

Love in little packages

By the end of our drive, we had collected 1043 gifts through Amazon and $1300 donated through PayPal, most of this from strangers or acquaintances who never gave a second thought to trusting two people they knew only from the Internet to do right by their donations. That’s particularly touching given the number of social-media scams for donations and sympathy.

We nearly hit a setback right at the end when an arsonist set fire to the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew in Brooklyn, where Occupy Sandy was headquartered and stockpiling relief aid and where about 10 percent of Sacks for Sandy gifts had been wrapped and stored. The fire was put out rapidly enough that most supplies and all the toys avoided damage.

My parents eventually got their power back, and so did we. As our lives returned to normal, Leah and I became so grateful that we had taken the time to transform our frustration into something that made a meaningful contribution to lives around us. Social networks may be blamed for keeping people from making human contact, but even with Leah and I so many miles apart, we connected — and then spread that connection to thousands of others to bring a little light into darkened lives.

Sacks for Sandy update

We have finalized the distribution part of the toy drive.

Thanks to our contact at the Long Island Patch, we were able to hook up with the Mayor of Lindenhurst, a hard hit town, who then hooked us up with the Lindenhurst fire department, who are doing a Santa run to the areas of their town most affected. We’ll be donating a portion of the toys for their Santa run.

That gave me the idea to ask my father, who is very involved with the volunteer fire services on Long Island, to help us out. As it turned out, he was meeting last night with chiefs from affected areas (he had a bunch of donated smoke detectors to give them). He spoke to them and we decided to donate to the fire departments from Massapequa, Lido Beach, Island Park and East Rockaway - areas that were devastated - to disperse to the children of their communities who lost their possessions during Sandy.

Also, the Nassau County Firefighters Museum has donated space to use for a wrapping party and they will also store the presents until the respective fire departments pick them up.

We have a Girl Scout troop as well as over a dozen local volunteers coming out to help us wrap.

This has totally been a group effort and it’s awesome that the very large group that is making this happen comes from all over the world. 

We will keep you updated as more happens, and we will be putting photos up at the website.

Also, if you are local (south shore Long Island) and want to help wrap next Saturday, give me a shout.

Thank you so much from me and Leah. 

Sacks for Sandy: why and how

Several people last night asked me why. Why am I doing a toy drive? What made me want to do this?

It’s simple, really. In the first light after Sandy, when I realized there were people losing their homes, I felt helpless. I was slow to get the news as I had no power myself. The first five days after the storm were spent with no tv and a very slow internet connection that wouldn’t let me load up news sites all the way. It was when we moved camp to my parents’ house and finally got to watch tv and check out the news that I was able to see the depth of the devastation. Sure, I had no power, my life was disrupted and I was displaced for almost two weeks but looking at what others were going through made me feel so helpless. I wanted to do something, but I had so little gas in my car (dumb move on my part not to fill up before a storm) I couldn’t even go wait on a gas line - if I could even find an open gas station. 

And that’s when I started thinking, what can I do later? What would be needed from me in a week or so when my life hopefully got back to normal and other people were still struggling with the aftermath? It was when I looked at pictures of the Rockaways and saw one photo of a mother standing in front of her burned out house, four kids by her side that I knew. I wanted to do something for the kids. It’s hard enough for an adult to deal with the loss of a home and everything in it, imagine how it feels for a child. Everything that is comforting to them is gone. 

I was leaving for vacation (one that had been planned a year ago) on November 9th so I made it a goal to get something started as soon as I got back. That’s when Leah hit me up to tell me she was organizing a blood drive in San Francisco. It made me think of the power that was within the internet to do something, to help people from across the country. What I thought would be a small toy drive I conducted at work turned into something else when I ran my idea by Leah. She was on board. We’d bring people from all over the world together to send some holiday cheer to kids who needed a little normalcy in their lives. Their whole entire lives were disrupted. Let’s try to un-disrupt their holidays while giving them back some of the things they may have lost in the storm. 

I spent a good deal of my vacation exchanging ideas with Leah in email and we had the toy drive pretty fleshed out by the time I got back to New York. Leah brought Aaron and Michael on board and I recruited my sister Lisa to help me out on this end and Sacks for Sandy was born.

It’s the internet angle that fascinates me. I’ve done something like this before, when I collected school supplies for kids displaced by Katrina. That was a huge success thanks to the internet and back then I only had blogs to rely on to spread the word. Now there’s whole new network of social media sites that can be used to bring people together for a good cause.

We put the call out at about 5:00 yesterday. By 7:00 our goal had been halfway met and the Sacks for Sandy message had been reblogged, retweeted and shared on Facebook more times than I ever hoped it would be. The reaction was swift and positive and only one person I know of questioned the trustworthiness of Leah of and myself (which is a totally legitimate thing when you are dealing with strangers). And that’s what struck me - the no questions asked thing. How people just jumped in and gave and implored their friends to give without question. People bought gifts, donated money and offered to help wrap and distribute the presents. People from right here in the New York area who themselves were victims of Sandy and people from California, London, Texas, Canada…all over the place. 

The internet indeed makes a large world small. And it makes doing a project like this so much easier and so very rewarding. It’s not just the giving to the kids and their families that warms my heart and makes me feel less helpless; it’s the fact that so many people instantly came together to support the drive that makes me believe my faith in humanity is not a misplaced faith. 

We are up to 279 gifts purchased toward our goal of 500 (and $200 in donations). I’m confident we’ll meet our goal and more. There are a whole lot of empathetic, generous people out there who just want to do good. 

I thank the internet for bringing us all together to do that. And I thank everyone who has given in any way to Sacks for Sandy, whether by buying a gift or helping us spread the word.