Hank Green

Hank Green Raised $72,000 For Refugee Resettlement Organizations In Face Of Trump’s Ban

In the face of President Donald Trump’s immigration and refugee ban, YouTube star and VidCon co-founder Hank Green just raised a ton of money for refugee resettlement organizations — to the tune of $71,750.

Earlier this month, after Trump’s polarizing executive order was signed — which banned all refugees to the U.S. for 120 days, and Syrian refugees indefinitely — Green announced that he planned to donate $5 to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for every hand-drawn message of support for immigrants and refugees shared with him via Twitter.

Subscribe to get the latest creator news

Subscribe

All told, Green said, he received more than 2,213 submissions — or a total of $11,065 for the ACLU.

This gave way to yet another charitable venture. Inspired by the swell of creations he’d received, Green reached out to 17 artists to create posters of the images they’d submitted.  He then vended these posters for roughly $12 apiece in a flash charity sale last weekend on

Don’t Forget To Be Awesome (DFTBA) — an e-commerce company co-founded by Green that sells merch by prominent YouTube stars. Green noted that he was making the donation because, as part of the ban, government funding for refugee resettlement organizations had also been halted.

The sale, Green announced yesterday, raised $71,750. And Erika Brown-Binion, the director of the Refugee Development Center (RDC), one of the organizations to have received funds from Green, wrote to him to express her gratitude. “We have never received an unsolicited donation even close to this amount,” she wrote in a message Green shared on Twitter (below). “This will support over 100 refugee youths and their families this summer.” 

Share
Published by
Geoff Weiss

Recent Posts

Have you heard? MrBeast’s Shark Tank spot, Minecraft goes after Roblox, and a robo racoon gets us in the mood for spooky season

Each week, we handpick a selection of stories to give you a snapshot of trends,…

1 day ago

The last thing creators add, the first thing viewers notice: Why Adobe is introducing music, speech, and sound effect generation to Firefly

In 2023, Photoshop developer Adobe jumped into generative AI with its launch of Firefly. Firefly…

1 day ago

Live Nation is capitalizing on the creator economy with a new firm

Ticketmaster parent Live Nation is getting into the creator biz. The publicly traded multinational corp,…

2 days ago

Netflix gets a bite of ‘Chicken Shop Date’

Netflix is getting a bucket of Chicken Shop Date. Amelia Dimoldenberg's long-running flirty-casual interview series…

2 days ago

Surprise: Neon is also making an SCP Foundation film, but correctly

Neon, the production company behind films like Parasite, Longlegs, and Anora, has decided it's going…

3 days ago

Noel Miller on why TMG Studios is breaking into fictional podcasts–and why it won’t touch gen AI

"If we're the last human-led media channel and everything else is prompted and generated in…

3 days ago