Hurricane Destruction!
When my online Bar Mitzvah Student and I were talking about his upcoming ceremony, he mentioned to me that he loves learning about how he can do his part to help make this world a better place. You see, at CoolCantor, Jewish education is central. You will not only learn how to sing a bar or bat mitzvah lessons Torah portion, but you will also learn about spreading kindness and goodness with everyone that we you come into contact with every single day. And my student who is from Florida has friends who are deeply affected and devastated by a recent hurricane.
Hurricane Ian made landfall on September 28th, 2022 and caused widespread devastation across a broad section of Central Florida. Over 25 counties have been approved for individual assistance with FEMA and almost 700,000 households have applied for FEMA assistance.
They worked in collaboration with partners at the Florida State Emergency Operations Center and members of Florida VOAD to fill critical response need gaps. They worked with Disaster Relief by Amazon, Volunteer Florida, and Adventist Community Services to stand-up critically needed warehouse operations for multi-agency use in the hard-hit areas of Ft. Myers and Coral Springs. This allows donated products to be received, stored, and distributed from centrally managed locations.
Recovery efforts will continue to focus on clean-up, debris removal, and tarping in the short-term. Good360 partners are working across the most impacted communities, including those that have received the least amount of attention, such as Pine Island. Once this mucking and gutting clean-up work is completed, communities will be able to begin the process of making permanent repairs to existing homes and rebuilding new ones.
Good360 is working in coordination with Volunteer Florida and Florida VOAD to ensure that they provide the right goods to the right people at the right time. Through these partnerships, they are able to ground-truth where the greatest level of need is, avoid duplication of effort, and ensure that they are contributing to a holistic approach to recovery.
To date, they have distributed more than $1 million worth of donated product to nonprofit partners supporting Hurricane Ian recovery efforts. They are committed to continuing their support for those impacted by this storm throughout the repair/rebuild and rehome process.
This is what my online Bar Mitzvah Student had in mind when he decided that he wanted to do so much more than just learn how to sing a Torah portion. He wanted to do some social action component and help those affected in Florida where his family is from. While he and his family weren’t directly impacted by the hurricane, many of his friends were. So for his bar mitzvah project he wanted to donate some money towards this relief fund and also encouraged his family and friends who attended his bar mitzvah to do the same and be charitable and kind. This is what CoolCantor is about. At Hebrew school my student learned how to read the Hebrew language. With me, he learned how to sing his Torah portion and also life lessons from the Torah on how to be impactful in the world we live in.
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