Special episode: Two additional ways you can help Ukraine

List of Ukrainian indie businesses/OSS contributors/creators to support: https://ukrainianweb.biz/

Donate to World Central Kitchen: https://donate.wck.org/ and let Michele know your donation is part of her matching campaign (michele@deployempathy.com)

This is intended as *additional* help in addition to the many other places to donate to help Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, rather than instead of those efforts.

Michele Hansen  0:00 
Hey, everyone, it's Michele here with a, yeah, I guess a special message on the Ukraine situation. So, like everyone around the world, we have been horrified by what is going on there, and trying to do whatever we can to help.

And so I just wanted to update you on two really quick things that that are ways that you can help as well.

So the first one is, is pulling together a list of Ukrainian indie businesses. As we know, there's a lot of developers and designers and people in our community, not not not just in our sort of global human community, but really in our world and our community in Ukraine, and want to want to support them as much as we can. And so pulling together a list on Twitter, but also my friend, Matt Nunogawa, he turned this into a website now. So you can go to Ukrainian web dot biz, and you can see a list of all of these businesses created and run by Ukrainians. Everything from a, you know, open source contributors to figma icons to morning pages app, coming soon pages, builder, databases, test management systems, Mac utilities, like clean my Mac, data for SEO purposes. There's also a personal finance money tracker app called Five Cents, which the story of that one just really hit me particularly hard, because the the developer just launched it a month ago. And he posted an update on the other day that saying that, you know, his his his feed for the last month is all sort of our normal, you know, building public kind of updates when we've just launched something. And then he said that he had to stop working on it and spend his time trying to keep his family safe from the attacks. So, um, lots of good businesses here. I hope we can all help support them. And so that's Ukrainian web dot biz, but also if you if you have friends in Ukraine, I mean, so many of us have staff and contractors and everything else. And friends in Ukraine. So if you know if people who are creators are running a SAS are infoproducts, open source, you know what, whatever, right? Like, you know, definitely just reply to the tweet, and let's build that list. 

The other thing is that so we on on behalf of Geocodio, we are are trying to raise $20,000 for World Central Kitchen. And so we will donate $10,000, we'll match $10,000. We've already donated $1,000. So this is on top of that, we're going to donate that $10,000 no matter what, but we would really love to make it more. And I'd love for you to help with that. Even if it's like five or $10 that that helps. Right World Central Kitchen is an amazing, nonprofit run by Chef Jose Andres who is a proud son of Washington, DC where I used to live, who goes around the world whenever there is a crisis to feed people. And his organization is truly wonderful. I volunteered with it myself during the US federal government shutdown couple of years ago when government employees you know, weren't getting paychecks and we're feeding them and so I've seen from my own eyes how wonderful giving of an organization it is, but also how well run it is. And Jose Andres himself is on the Polish border feeding people who are coming across.
 
Of course, there's many other ways to help as well. So I say this not as you should only help these efforts, but these are in addition to whatever else you might be doing. And yeah, so I hope you can help whether that's UkrainianWeb.biz or donating the World Central Kitchen and sending me receipts. 

But also, if you have people in Ukraine that you're supporting your I know, Harris Kenny, for example of IntroCRM. He has a staff member in Ukraine who is working with a group to buy groceries for people in Kyiv that you can also reach out to him about, but like if you know of efforts going on please let me know happy to use whatever platform we have to, to share that and and try to help people. 

So we'll be back to our normal programming this week. And sorry, next week. And yeah, thank you. Thank you for thank you for helping. Slava Ukraine.