20 Dec 2010 No Comments
The Reddit fundraising challenge leverages $55K from Christians, Atheists and Muslims: Part 2 of 3
Charity inspires goodwill, as proven by a current fundraiser launched by the Christianity, Atheism, and Islam groups in the social news site reddit.com. Together, they’ve raised over $55,000 from among their group members (members are called “redditors.”) Reading the reddit group threads, it’s clear that each group fully supports the other’s efforts. They are donating to each others’ causes, commenting in each others’ subreddit groups, and some are generously donating to both causes. As r/christianity member maggieed states so beautifully, “The joint campaign has also shown that people of different world-views can come together and cooperate for the greater good without compromising their own individual beliefs.”
To date, the subreddit groups Atheism, Christianity, and Islam have raised over $55,000. This shows both the power of engaged community and collaboration.
We asked redditor Jay Hazen (a.k.a. redditor “Denny Crane“) if he could answer some questions about the fundraiser and the reddit challenge. He answers our questions in the interview below. This is part two of a three-part interview with redditors. To read part one, an the interview with maggieed of the reddit Christianity subgroup, read here. The interview with redditor tinkthank who set up the r/islam fundraising page follows. For more background, read this story about the fundraising challenge in The Huffington Post. The complete time line, with links, can be found at the bottom of this blog post.
NOTE from redditor Jay Hazen, (a.k.a. redditor “Denny Crane”): I’d like to be clear that I am not a spokesperson for the community at reddit.com/r/atheism. I am not responsible for the actions of hundreds of people (much less 100,000+), but merely for the hours of organizing I put in to facilitate this holiday charity drive. Uniformity on the Internet will always be impossible, but I do have the ‘blessing’ of the founder and moderator of r/Atheism to answer these questions as myself, and hopefully provide a little more perspective on the community and why we did this in the process.
1. What inspired you to participate in the fundraiser?
I think Maggieed suggested that the r/Atheism fundraiser, the idea for which came in response to a post she made in r/Christianity, not operate in a silo and encourage cross-promotion. I do know that very quickly after I had set up the two r/Atheism fundraising pages, Maggie and I had a few conversations over private message that encouraged us to go into each other’s threads to show that real, well-intentioned people exist on both sides, and eventually the post on the homepage codified the collaborative nature of a “friendly competition.”
At its core, I think the issue working itself out right now is that both communities exist and are large. The two largest religious (non-)affiliations in both the U.S. and the U.K. (the two largest bases for our community at reddit) are Christians (all denominations) and the non-religious (all descriptions: atheist, agnostic, apatheist, secular humanist, just-don’t-care-to-label-myself, etc.). Both communities must also be mature about the billion Muslims worldwide who could and should be partners as well as occasional beneficiaries of good will through charitable efforts aimed at global development.
At the end of the year, no matter how the non-religious culturally identify, there’s a tendency of people to take stock and be charitable to the less-fortunate if they can. I think the positive reaction to this effort has helped all the groups, not just by way of people who donate to multiple sides but because each effort is more genuine for its ability to prioritize helping people over rival theological opinions.
The addition of r/Islam was a pleasant surprise, and I think if we had it to organize again (and we will, in the future), we would invite competitions from many subreddits, either related to religious identification or whichever other communities people on reddit identify with.
2. Is there a goal in mind?
The goals have thankfully been met and adjusted upward several times. At the outset, r/Atheism was hoping to hit $10,000, and a little more than ten days later we’ve surpassed our new target of $42,000 (a number chosen in tribute to Douglas Adams).
However, a ‘side goal’ of seeing these communities cooperate so fully has been excellent to watch unfold. I don’t know if any of us knew exactly what to expect, but there was a vein of ecumenical good will that multiple communities have simultaneously tapped, underscoring our commonality rather than our differences.
3. Do you have a sense of whether or not the friendly competition inspired people to donate?
I believe the “friendly competition” aspect inspired people to donate in two ways. First, it inspired people who might otherwise have only operated within the echo chamber of their own community to give to a campaign operated by people with whom they disagree on separate issues of metaphysics. Second, I do think the larger reddit community was pleased that these communities, the fringes of which have antagonized each other in the past in addition to larger cultural opposition between the groups, would cooperate using our little corner of the web in order to help each other meet their goals for a greater purpose.
I think community pride has propelled people to be generous. If the community in question is one particular subreddit, the pride might express itself as a single donation. However, I think people identifying with the larger reddit community or the larger peer-to-peer community might inspire donations to multiple campaigns.
4. Has this changed the your group’s opinion towards r/christianity in any way? Do you have a sense of how this fundraiser has brought together the three groups?
Speaking personally, I didn’t enter the “friendly competition” fundraising drive with much by way of positive or negative expectations. It happened too quickly. I also didn’t know what to expect from the members of the religious subreddits, as the only thought I had about them beforehand was that they were places for theists to gather and that heterodox topics would quickly result in banning. None of that was formed by first-hand experience, either, so I’d say my opinion went from a vague, weakly-held belief that I should just avoid those communities to first-hand experience that they can be open collaborators when a good cause presents itself even if they have fundamental disagreements with their collaborators.
I suppose the rest of reddit had a similar realization about r/Atheism, and we may have even surprised ourselves a little bit with how successful we’ve been. I believe that the door is wide open for future collaboration, possibly through but not limited to an annual holiday drive. The mere fact that we’re seriously considering working together again in a similar fashion would indicate something of a bridge between these communities, who can be contentious both on the Internet and in our daily lives.
5. Why did you choose to use FirstGiving? How has FirstGiving been helpful?
FirstGiving is regularly used by Doctors Without Borders, and I had used it in the past when throwing a small event (happy hour) to raise a little bit of money (a few hundred dollars). When I came across the thread for r/Atheism that saw a community ready to give and a charity already selected, I decided to use a skill set I’ve previously used for charitable fundraising, and that included operating a land page.
FirstGiving is recommended by Doctors Without Borders via a direct link on their site (in the “create your own fundraising page” section). There has been general agreement that FirstGiving offers a range of services that made it seem like a natural choice. A few features to point out would be easy editing of descriptions and goals, easy creation of pages (so that r/Christianity and later r/Islam were quickly able to make parallel pages to the r/Atheism one), and ability to use the “comments” section as verifiable evidence of the cross-pollination in donations we’ve seen among these communities.
6. I’ve noticed that members of all three subreddit communities have donated to each other’s fundraiser. Why is that? Is there something unique about this fundraiser, your particular subgroups, or the Reddit community that inspires this kind of mutual generosity?
Perhaps there are enough people willing to offer help organizing and see the “big picture” that allow the subreddits to collaborate more easily. I can say that my interactions with Maggieed at r/Christianity and tinkthank at r/Islam have been easygoing and focused on a common purpose – and the same goes for the people with whom I’ve collaborated at r/Atheism (a partial list includes sjmarotta, heidavey, skeen, skitch, 40percent, Masquerouge, Nougat, patcon, xknight2, platypus4213, the_oncoming_storm, and RandomKindness).
I think that non-religious people need to be ready and able to cooperate with the religious without patronizing or compromising. I believe, conversely, that well-intentioned religious communities should accept as willing partners non-religious people who share common goals of improving conditions for the most vulnerable people in our wider world without a harsh spiritual litmus test or residual guilt trip. These ostensibly opposing communities already do exist and will continue to exist. If we accept division on points of general disagreement, there is no reason not to continue to use that process to pare down the world around you until it is ideologically pure to your eyes while at the same time incapable of large scale collective action for good. It is much more productive for us to work together in a spirit of common generosity than to spend our energy dividing ourselves.
I think this drive demonstrates that you needn’t compromise your beliefs or concede to a belief you don’t share in order to make positive change together, and I hope to see more such efforts, using touchstones of transparency, ambition, and collaboration rather than writing people off as bad faith partners because they fall somewhere else in terms of belief. As we stare down the possibility of a global civilization communicating instantly across border and culture, we would do well to keep that spirit of flexibility in mind and put it into practice as often as possible.
The complete background story about how these three fundraisers began:
On December 9th, redditor maggieed suggested in a new thread to the reddit Christianity subgroup, of which she is a member, ” if every member of r/christianity donates just $4.45, we can build a health clinic in an impoverished area that desperately needs one. Let’s do it!”
This conversation thread inspired the reddit subgroup Atheism to create its own fundraiser, as stated by member sjmarotta December 9: “Let the (sometimes pointless) animosity between our groups be used for good! Let the X-mas Wars and the overall battle for goodness in the world begin!”
R/atheism reddit member Denny-Crane was actually the first to set up fundraising pages, on both FirstGiving and JustGiving, for r/atheism to benefit Doctors Without Borders.
Because not all religious people are ok with giving to an Atheism-branded campaign,” says maggieed, she set up a FirstGiving fundraising page for r/christianity to benefit World Vision’s Clean Water Fund.
R/Islam group member tinkthank began discussing the fundraiser in the subreddit Islam group here. He set up a fundraiser on FirstGiving to benefit Islamic Relief.
