www.TsunamiRecovery.coop Raises Over US $40,000

Immediately after the tsunami ravaged South Asia in December, the Cooperative Development Foundation launched the Tsunami Cooperative Recovery Fund and set up a .coop site to provide online access to the fund to contributors. CDF, which promotes community, economic and social development through cooperative enterprises in the US, set the fund up to focus on the long term needs of the affected communities. CDF Board Chair Terry Lewis noted at the time the fund was set up that ""Contributions to the fund will be used specifically to rebuild cooperatives that have been severely damaged or destroyed in the disaster.""

Both dotCoop and OSGCD, the registry operator for the .coop TLD, donated the registration fee for the domain name to the Fund.

At this time, the Fund has raised more than $40,000 - all of which will be distributed to cooperative initiatives in these devastated communities. CDF (www.cdf.coop) will be guided in disbursing 100% of these contributions by an advisory group with expertise in international cooperative development. For current information, please check the web sites.

To learn more about efforts by the cooperative community to assist in rebuilding, the International Cooperative Alliance (www.ica.coop) has published several summaries of these initiatives in their Weekly Digests:

http://www.ica.coop/ica/digest/33-digest.pdf Initial news
http://www.ica.coop/ica/digest/35-digest.pdf Initial news
http://www.ica.coop/ica/digest/39-digest.pdf Update
http://www.ica.coop/ica/digest/40-digest.pdf Update
http://www.ica.coop/ica/digest/41-digest.pdf Update

Published on 04 August 2005