The Kindness of Strangers

ACTS OF RANDOM STRANGERS

What's the nicest thing a stranger (who you never met and never saw again) has done for you? Wouldn't he or she be an Angel?

These sixteen (16) acts of random strangers will restore you faith in human kind.

Why We Can Depend On The Kindness Of Strangers

Our ability to get along with folks who aren't relatives could be a legacy of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. And it's rooted in the fact that those societies had gender equality.

Kind acts of all sizes touch everyones heart.

If this blog were Us Magazine, we'd say: Hunter-gatherers, we're just like them.

Because seriously, we are.

Tweet #LoveTwitter Here's the story. Humans today live and work in communities with vast numbers of folks we're not related to. And we often quite happily cooperate and share knowledge with strangers or mere acquaintances. These exchanges allow us to innovate and develop increasingly complex technologies. And that cooperative behavior, which is fairly unique to humans, may be rooted in the fact that our hunter-gatherer ancestors believed that women and men were equal!
That's the upshot of a new study published this week in Science. A team of anthropologists at University College London interviewed hundreds of couples in two hunter-gatherer tribes, the Palanan Agta of the Philippines and Congo's Mbendjele BaYaka, as well as the Filipino farming tribe the Paranan, which is a patriarchal society.
Of course, contemporary tribes don't necessarily live the way their forefathers and foremothers did. They "are not living fossils," explains Mark Dyble, the doctoral student who is the study's lead author. But they do likely offer anthropologists a strong approximation of the lifestyles and communities of our oldest ancestors. And the way we behave today largely evolved from the successful strategies that our progenitors adopted to survive.
So how did gender equality perhaps lead to humans learning the benefits of helping and working with strangers? It all comes down to housing. Members of current hunter-gatherer tribes say they prefer to live close to their kinfolk. That makes sense, since siblings and grandparents can help with child care.

They hunt, they gather, they're equal! An elderly Agta couple in the Philippines was part of the study on how communities are formed.

But even though that's what they say, it's not what they do. In fact, the tribes live in camps that are heavily populated with folks to whom they're not related. That anomaly has long been noted by researchers, but it remained an unsolved puzzle. "Now we have an explanation for why that is," Dyble says.

Here's what his team found.

Hunter-gatherer tribes today live in groups of 10 to 50 households, with an average of about 20. The composition of each group changes almost constantly, which is not surprising given that households tend to move every 10 days or so as they hunt and gather.
In a patriarchal society, the men make all the decisions about which group to join — and these couples do end up living in villages mostly composed of the husband's relatives. But men and women in hunting-and-gathering tribes have an equal say in deciding which groups they'll join. (That kind of gender equality reflects the important role both parents play in raising children.)
Usually, the wife wants to live with her people and the husband wants to live with his people. So the spouses are constantly trying to accommodate each other. But when all of a tribe's households are trying to put together camps mostly inhabited by kin and in-laws, you can imagine how complicated the negotiations get. And so in the end, neither husband nor wife succeeds in creating a family camp.
"It is not that individuals are not interested in living with kin," says Dyble. "Rather, if all individuals seek to live with as many kin as possible, no one ends up living with many kin at all."
What's surprising here is that even though these people end up living with a bunch of strangers, the group members cooperate. They readily share resources, and they hunt, fish and collect food cooperatively, despite the lack of blood ties. Why?
"Sharing and cooperation is crucial to survival," explains Andrea Migliano, the paper's senior author. "So [tribe members] evolved mechanisms to cooperate with unrelated individuals."

Researchers visited this Mbendjele camp in a forest in the Republic of Congo to talk to hunter-gatherers.

For example, hunters only find food about 75 percent of the time. That would mean a family would go hungry one day out of four. But that doesn't happen because unrelated neighbors learned to share their food.
It turns out there's another benefit to reducing the number of kinfolk in a camp. The result is that any given individual would probably have a relative or two in lots of other camps. And those family ties make it easier for different camps to bond with each other and exchange information and tools instead of trying to buy or take stuff by force.
The equal rights attitude of the hunter-gatherers didn't survive when these folks turned to farming. Patriarchal lines took precedence for passing down land, and gender equality went out the door.

But the strategies for getting along with strangers have stayed with us.

So if you wonder why, despite the ability of humans to be warlike and cruel, we can also donate blood to strangers and write checks to charities that help people we don't know ... maybe it's the legacy of our hunter-gatherer past.

The Kindness of Strangers

http://thekindnessofstrangers.co/do-you-believe-in-the-kindness-of-strangers/

He found himself thinking the worst of people―until he was graced with an act of simple, unexpected generosity that changed his perspective. One night shortly after Thanksgiving last year, a deeply crummy mind-set I’d taken on went though an instantaneous reversal. As if a magician had said, “Presto,” the New York City landscape likewise flipped from seedy to radiant. The shift proved that the city I move through every day (often with narrowed eyes and clenched jaw) is partly a projection of my self-centered fears. With an attitude adjustment, I came to see that a dark world can become floodlit in a heartbeat. I had been in upstate New York. Bad flying weather had nudged me to take the bus back to the city from Syracuse University, area where I teach and work for GE as consultant, during the week. I hadn’t boarded a Greyhound or Train since my surf-bum youth, back when the seats still sported ashtrays. Lugging my computer bag and suitcase down the aisle that snowy day, I felt stared at, like an outsider, which, honestly, stung more than it should have.

A few stops out, a gray-haired lady and a girl about 5 years old slid into the row in front of me. Though the woman’s bun was springing scraggles at the hairline, the girl’s fancy tight braids must have taken a full day to do. He had a round pudding face with curious eyes. As I marked papers with a pen, her chin rested on the seat top before me. “Schoolteachers are supposed to use a red pencil,” she said.

Told to stop bothering the lady, the girl announced she was starving to death. At which point, the woman fished out a single sleeve of soda crackers, claiming that was all they had until they reached the Bronx―a good five hours away. The kid crunched loudly through the crackers in a spray of crumbs. When he complained of thirst, the woman said, “There will be water fountains at the Albany layover. Just drink your own spit.”

Before long, the girl had swung around to my seat to demonstrate her double-jointed elbows and thumbs as well as a disturbingly loud clack in his jaw when she opened his mouth full bore. I gave her a pad, a pencil and a pen, and soon he sat beside me and started drawing – she was very talented -- outlining slope-sided apartment buildings and wavy sidewalks peopled with trolls etc.

In Albany, seats started to fill up, and I was advised to move my suitcase to the luggage compartment in the undercarriage. The grandmother carried my computer bag down, too. Afterward, I headed to a nearby diner, where I bought extra sandwiches, juice boxes, and fruit―later claiming they had inexplicably appeared in my deli bag. We three ate without talking much, and as snowy dark enveloped the bus, we lolled to sleep, jostling all the way to the city. At times I’d use the train as well.

After we had made it to the Port Authority, I stood by the lower luggage door, watching as stuff was pulled out into the bus terminal’s celery green light. My suitcase made it, but not the computer bag. The grandmother and the girl stood blinking alongside me as I groused about losing student papers and manuscripts―plus a pricey new laptop. The driver gestured vaguely toward Lost and Found as the girl tugged the grandmother’s sleeve; I felt more annoyed than panicked.

Then it dawned on me: The drawstring jewelry pouch I usually rathole in my purse at all times had also been slipped into that computer bag. I normally keep that pouch on my person at all times, but on this one occasion I happened to have placed it elsewhere. I could envision the sole piece of heritage jewelry my mother had left me (and grandma had left her): a delicate cameo that had belonged to my grandmother. Its absence hit me in the rib cage like a flaming arrow. The grandmother’s brow furrowed, and he seemed stricken by how unfair it all was, but then he and the little girl said good-bye and veered off into the subway crush hour.

At times of stress or exhaustion or fear, a jabbering voice in my head often cranks up. Loud, insistent, it never, ever has a shred of good news. Idiot, idiot, idiot, it said. Why did you move the pouch tonight? Rather than dismiss the voice and deal with the problem at hand, I found myself projecting it outward onto random strangers. I half ran through the overheated station, pocketbook tucked stolidly under one arm and then in front of me. Sweating like a sow, I wrestled my suitcase up two levels of stalled escalators, all the while silently cursing this person as a dimwit, that one as a pompous ass.

The office of lost bus (or train) objects was lit like a dungeon and smelled like a wet sock in a locker room, its counter manned by a lanky kid in a floppy red Santa hat. “Your mother’s cameo,” he said. “That sucks.”

Filling out the form, I let my misery flare. The cameo was no mere trinket by then. It’s the principle, I muttered. Forget that I hadn’t worn it in decades and really had hardly ever looked at it. It was my only inheritance. Its carved visage had become―solely through its loss―a rare totem of maternal love, a saint’s venerated bone.

I set down the pen and stood immobile for a second or two. Faced with my inert, gloomy form, the Santa-Hat Kid eventually asked, “So what do you want me to do?”

I growled, “I want you to go find somebody―and kick his/her ass.”

On the walk home, I found streets seething with characters of the most sinister variety. Shoppers scuttled around me like so many scorpions. Under every baseball cap, beard and handle=bar ‘stache a shadow was hiding a face with fangs.

An hour or so later, I was watching my girlfriend finish dinner when my cell phone buzzed. It was that grandmother from the bus.

What followed was a turn of events that, if it doesn’t convince you there’s a mysterious form to our intersecting paths, may at least reignite faith in the random goodness of other souls. It seems that the grandmother was trudging through the subway tunnel when he spotted from the corner of her eye a young man dragging my computer bag. She shot through the crush hour crowd to grab his arm, shouting, “That’s not your bag!”

The crazy part is, he just let go right off, no struggle whatsoever. He dropped the handle and bolted away. “He knew he was wrong,” she said.

Minutes later, my girlfriend and I found ourselves in a cab going to the grandmother’s house in the Bronx. All the way there, I saw the city recover its sparkle. The Christmas lights slid like bright markers along or icicles up/down the sides of the wet windows. The driver regaled us with every fat reward he had gotten for returning parcels, and I told him about the half-dozen cabbies who had brought various forgotten briefcases, debit/credit cards, wallets, car/house key sets and phones back to me over the years.

Suddenly every streetlight seemed to reveal some touching, unlikely, almost staged tableau. A homeless woman left her doorway to help heave a carriage over a curb’s wide puddle; a man in a tuxedo offered the cab he had just flagged down to an old man.

My girlfriend stayed in the chugging cab while the grandmother and I hugged on the stoop. What kills me even now was her keen concern that I would blame her for anything the guy might have taken from the bag. “We didn’t even unzip it once,” he vowed. Which was ridiculous, of course, since I trusted her, as I did everybody, at least that night.

I catalog lucky events like this on a back page of my journal. Since my default mood remains muddy gloom, I need a permanent inventory of inspiring moments; otherwise the seemingly miraculous can vaporize with a shift in mood. Regular prayer and meditation help, too. (Both practices I mocked as moronic, and those associates you reference as “having adult imaginary friends” until I got desperate enough to try them.)

If these efforts to rid my vision of its dark scrim pay off (I admit, they don’t always), I greet the sidewalk crush with a wide expanse in my chest and a buoyant gait. Each random face appears to me like a finely embroidered quilt square in a brilliant urban mosaic.

On those other nights, when I see a terrorist hanging from every subway strap, I conjure the memory of that missing bag. It is a corrective lens I can use to click the world back into focus, to flip my inner lights back on.

One Passover I was on a subway train in NYC going to Union Sq. Station in Manhattan from Downtown, B'klyn. I lost my wallet on that subway train. Later that day I got a phone call saying that he, an unidentified individual, had found my wallet and wanted to return it, since it was Passover.

He left it with one of his employees at the front desk of his establishment and wanted me to pick it up, when I got a chance. I thanked him profusely, for my life was in it.

One day in Germany, I was on a Uban-train in Wilhelmshaven W. Germany at the time, going to Hamburg in Europe. I lost my wallet on that subway train, station platform restaurant.

Later that day I got a phone call saying that he, another unidentified individual, had found my wallet and wanted to return it. I'm guessing it was the man sitting across from me reading his paper.
He left it with one of his employees at the front desk of his establishment and wanted me to pick it up, at my convenience.

I thanked him profusely, for my life was in it. My driver's license, 400+ marks ( cash & travelers checks ), ~$20,000 in corp. & personal debit/credit cards, sentimental pictures and IDs etc.
I had already reported it to the police as lost or stolen at - Land's End, train station.
There was some concern about being blamed for any item(s) missing, since I had police in tow. "Rest assured,"I said "No issues there."
I had parked illegally and my rental car was also impounded, since not having driver credentials, I had a tough time getting my rental car back.
I di dhave a note from the police that seem to rectify the situation.
I was insured as a traveler, by the company I worked for UTC - Norden Systems and had personal insurance as well that would handle emergency cash transactions while traveling via the MasterCard/Eurocard, Visa/ Amex Cards I carried, all I had to do is present ID and ATM receipts etc. I was also covered for any travelers checks and as well as emergency cash from outfits like AMEX/ Visa & AAA.

In the past decade I was in the middle east working for the naval forces at their academy I was let go early, but I and the company i worked for need to get paid to end of contract year regardless. I spent the next 6 months in limbo a man without a country as the case wound its way thru the court systems. I won in the end and got a payment with six months bonus, my laywer played bridge with the presiding judge every Thursday, it turns out. It was a nice chunk of change $12k for the year and another $6k bonus, plus my salary for six months in compendatory and punitive damages; for emotional duress, trouble and tribulations. By then ofcourse I had moved on and was in the AOR, on a next adventure, making 5x more than my $50K and another $50k in benefits.

My wife, she loved it, at the time more recent (now x-wife) lost a laptop in the back seat of a taxi, purportedly. It was later retrieved by her brother, who kept it in the Philippines.

I lost a set of keys for a '08 Toyota FJ Cruiser on the backseat of a taxi in Bklyn NY and it was returned to me at the end of the driver's shift. By then I had new keys made up, but was NOT charged by the Locksmith, I engaged via AAA.
He had trouble re-programming the key to work with the vehicle. I after he left, had no issue reprogramming the key, however, given a little bit of patience which he was apparently lacking. I disconnected and reconnected the battery and that did the trick after restarting and re-engaging the system's ignition -- 5 to 6 times, with the help of the Toyota dealership on the phone.
I called AAA and explained that I didn't pay for the service, because they, the Locksmiths couldn't program the keys. The next day the supervisor of the Locksmith showed up and we talked about what happened.

More recently, I was in Orlando Eye and lost my tablets in a black leather case and a smartphone, also in a case by Samsung. Someone or the outside guard found it and turned it into Lost and Found, using one of the Securitas Guards. I approached Lost and Found and an hour later retrieved by two tablets and a phone. I was relieve since again my whole life is in these things.

While there a man approached me and said he'll buy me a meal and some beer at Yard House Restaurant. I accompanied him inside and ordered an Octoberfest pint of Beer and a Hamburger with Pepper-jack Cheese, which I immediately consumed. I told him I had just come from a dinner party at the Southwest Library at Dr Phillips where I was also fed, earlier, but it was a vegetarian dinner. It was now my Lunch. He insisted I order two more glasses of beer and a to-go box for later. He wanted in exchange some company and conversation and we talked of many things, angels, conspiracy theories and current events there at the bar. He wanted to know how I thought about him, I said, "I Know you for about 5 mins. That, said I thought you are a gracious, kind and generous person for offering." He told me, "I makes signs that light up, like Uncle Julio's." Uncle Julio's is a restaurant that just opened across the way. He said, that he would want to meet and angel for he would probably be 7 to 10' tall etc...

Another time while in their ( Eye of Orlando ) main hall, a lady approached me and said, "I'm going to buy you a meal?" "What do you want?," She said. I answered "A pizza slice and a soda." I got a slice of pizza with pepperoni, baked ziti and a large coke.

I've been in place like Rt. 128 in and around Boston MA in the coldest Winter on record and got a flat tire. Not being dressed for the occasion I was screw and basically stranded. A gentleman appeared out of nowhere and changed out my flat tire with a spare in trunk for my late model 2-seater Toyota MR-2. I offered to pay him for his trouble and he refused saying, "Do it, pay it forward, for the next person that comes along."
"Would he be an angel, sir?," I asked the new found friend at Yard House's Bar.

I had been traveling and suffered a stroke, I believe the steward put me on a wheelchair and wheeled me out to the sidewalk in the Baltimore/DC area airport. A potbellied man came out of the airport main terminal, for a smoke and noticed my symptoms and call Emergency Medical Services, who saved my life. The blood pressure management meds I was taking also helped out.
"Wouldn't he be an angel?," I asked the new found friend at Yard House. These people appear from nowhere, provide exactly what you need at the time and disappear and you never see them again, to so much as thank them.

Currently, people have stopped in in the street peeled of 6 bills and put it in my hand, that's anywhere from $6 to 600.00+, depending on what holiday and where I am. A policeman even stopped me and handed me $100. I was floored. Every once in a while I find the same balled up and thrown at the threshold of notel, motel parking lot entrances, meant for me to find. At least once I gave it to a waitress from Myanmar, in OutBack, saying I found it outside. There are several individuals, who I see periodically and they hand me anywhere from $1 to $20+. Then there is the occasional dog-eared $1 bill found on the ground in a crowded area or empty parking lot. Others I'll help with chores for same, I'd for example pack, unpack and setup a buddy's food truck for him and he's give to me a burger fries and a coke in addition. I met recently two ladies who go around asking strangers for money, I was behind them on line at a Burger King and one lady was converting her random $10, $20 paper currency, dollar bills and small change into higher order cash which is easier to carry, the total take that day was $200. They tell me the minimum they collect on a daily basis is $100, it was a Xmas holiday so they were able to get more money. She gave it to the cashier, the manager was cross with the cashier because he didn't call her to accept the cash, saying she needs to make sure it is in fact $200 legitimate currency that the store is getting and that he should be taking care of the impatient customers that were queue up behind the ladies."

At times anonymous folks approach and ask if I need something to eat. Yes sir is my reply and he hands me $5. After breakfast at Panera, I go to the libraray down the street at Dr. Phillips & Dela Dr. a lady approaches me and hands me a $10 Subway giftcrad for lunch. Saying some gave that to her but she doesn't eat Subway. I thank her, she says no thank you. A curious thing.

How the Kindness of Strangers Became a Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry

A 110-year-old World War II veteran in Texas was able to remain in his home last year after his family raised nearly $200,000 online to pay for his nursing care. A Harvard-bound teen in Compton, Calif. put out a digital call for help and received $21,000 for textbooks and other expenses so that he could afford to attend the Ivy League school. In Detroit, residents raised more than $2,200 for a 74-year-old peanut vendor whose motorized bicycle, which he used to push his cart, was stolen.

These are just three among millions of Americans who have turned to sites like GoFundMe and YouCaring in recent years in the hopes that sharing details of their personal plights will mobilize strangers to help them. Crowdfunding — the practice of raising small amounts of money from a large number of donors online — was once the province of startups and political campaigns. But over the past five years, it has ballooned into a multi-billion-dollar charity industry, with donations going not to gadgets or causes but to individual people.

Since GoFundMe launched in 2010, more than 40 million individual donors have raised more than $4 billion, with the fastest growing category of requests in education. YouCaring, a similar site, has raised more than $800 million since 2011, largely for personal medical causes. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, 22% of Americans have donated to a crowdfunding site like one of these.

This growth is fueled by the generosity of ordinary people and social media-driven campaigns — but it’s also driven by structural gaps that have left too many Americans one piece of bad luck away from financial hardship. More than 40% of Americans are not prepared to handle a sudden expense of $400 or more, like replacing a broken car engine or visiting an emergency room without insurance, according to a recent report by the Federal Reserve.

“People need help,” says GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon, who left his job as a partner in a venture capital firm to take over the company in 2015. “People want to be empowered to help each other out. There’s a lot of need out there.”

Crowdfunding has also become a new way to respond to disasters and public tragedies. After 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed Aug. 12 in Charlottesville, Va. while protesting a white supremacy rally, a GoFundMe campaign quickly drew more than $220,000 in her memory. When Hurricane Harvey struck Texas on Aug. 25, about 850 GoFundMe campaigns launched in less than a week, bringing in a reported $4.5 million for causes ranging from caring for rescued pets to rebuilding destroyed homes.

Online crowdfunding began as a way to serve much less personal causes. Indiegogo and Kickstarter, which launched in 2008 and 2009, allowed entrepreneurs and small businesses to get funding for inventions and projects like the Coolest Cooler — a high-tech drink container with a built-in blender, waterproof bluetooth speaker and a USB charger — and a movie reboot of the beloved Veronica Mars television franchise.

Sites like GoFundMe and YouCaring saw a chance to tap this impulse, and built user-friendly interfaces that feel more like social networks than traditional charity websites, with trending topics and colorful videos. GoFundMe’s founders, Brad Damphousse and Andrew Ballester, had previously founded Paygr, a site where neighbors can buy and sell items or services, and their new company extended the support of neighbors to a much broader community. One of GoFundMe’s early successes came after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, when more than 34,000 donors raised more than $2 million for those who were seriously injured.

GoFundMe’s founders also saw a business opportunity. GoFundMe takes 5% of what every campaign raises, in addition to passing along a credit card processing fee to donors. YouCaring, in contrast, only charges the credit card fee and is supported by donations. Neither company releases financial information, but GoFundMe says nine campaigns in the past year and a half have topped $1 million — which would mean more than $450,000 for GoFundMe, for those large campaigns alone.

While no one disputes that this new fundraising model has helped hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not without its challenges. The most successful crowdfunding campaigns convey a dramatic story of heartbreak or hope, complete with photos and personal details. But many people in need don’t have a story that fits neatly into a compelling narrative, or the digital savvy to package it that way. And then there’s the randomness of what the internet elevates and discards. For every case like the Texas World War II veteran, who raised far more than his family had ever hoped, there are dozens of campaigns that never catch on, leaving people struggling.

The decision to post a personal story on a crowdfunding site can be a difficult one. “I’ve always been very independent. I’ve always been everybody’s go-to person. You have to humble yourself,” says Tatia Little, a single mother in Maryland who raised about $6,700 of her $20,000 goal to get her son through art school. “I don’t have any other way to do this, and we can’t not do it.”

“It is what it is,” adds Little, 50, who works at the U.S. Social Security Administration. “You think, ‘What are they going to think of me?’ You get to a point where it doesn’t matter.’”

Anthony Carbajal reached that point in the summer of 2014. As the Ice Bucket Challenge swept the internet to raise money for ALS research, the 26-year-old was caring for his mother, who had been diagnosed with the progressive neurological disease, when he learned that he, too, had ALS.

The shaken Carbajal, a wedding photographer from California, recorded a video in his home describing his fears of one day being fully paralyzed from the incurable condition. “I’ve been so terrified of ALS my entire life because it runs in my family,” he says, before breaking down and turning away.

He posted the moving video at the top of his YouCaring page, where he asked for help paying for costs Medicaid wouldn’t cover, like making his home wheelchair accessible. He raised more than $266,000 in nine months and appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, where the TV host gave Carbajal $100,000 in buckets of cash — half for ALS research and the other half for his family.

“I didn’t know how my mom and I would pay for our medical needs,” Carbajal told TIME recently. “I thought that would be my demise.”

Carbajal can no longer lift his arms or fully hold his neck up, and he is slowly losing his ability to walk and breathe. His mother is now fully paralyzed, but the two count their blessings.

“We’re one of the lucky ones,” says Carbajal, who is now married and lives in an accessible home purchased with help from YouCaring’s donors. “We have a home. My mom has a caregiver in the home she got married in. My life would be completely different without crowdfunding.”

rowdfunding is still dwarfed by traditional charities, which bring in hundreds of billions of dollars each year in the U.S. But mainstays like the American Red Cross and Salvation Army are taking note of the medium’s appeal to a younger generation of donors. As direct-mail and telethon contributors age, century-old nonprofits see an opportunity to draw new digital funding streams from crowdfunding sites.

“We wouldn’t have been here this long if we didn’t continue to adapt and evolve,” says Jennifer Elwood, vice president of consumer marketing and fundraising at the Red Cross, which has worked with CrowdRise, a site acquired by GoFundMe last year. CrowdRise’s supporters are an average 45 to 55 years old, compared to the 70-to-80-year-old donors who respond to the Red Cross’ direct-mail campaigns. “Part of our DNA is meeting people where they’re at and making sure we’re relevant,” Elwood says.

The Salvation Army, too, is taking a closer look at crowdfunding. When flooding hit Louisiana last summer, damaging thousands of homes and businesses, donors gave $4 million to the Salvation Army’s relief efforts, which the organization said was not enough to meet the needs on the ground. In contrast, GoFundMe users raised more than $11 million for more than 6,000 campaigns related to the flood. The disparity was enough to prompt the Salvation Army to consider using crowdfunding campaigns in the future, according to Ron Busroe, the group’s national secretary for community relations and development.

Charitable donations in the U.S. have steadily increased since 2010, reaching a record high of $390 billion in 2016, a figure that includes donations given to traditional charities and some crowdfunding campaigns, according to the Giving USA Foundation. That’s a dramatic increase from the roughly $134 billion raised in 1976, adjusted for inflation, as well as the $307 billion donated in 2009.

“There is a very significant role that crowdfunding is playing,” says Una Osili, associate dean for research and international programs at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, which works with Giving USA to track charitable giving. “It’s increasing the overall amount, but it’s also broadening who is participating. It has the potential to draw new donors and make giving more inclusive.”

Still, crowdfunding comes with risks that aren’t present when giving to an established nonprofit. Many believed Jennifer Flynn Cataldo in January 2016 when the 37-year-old Alabama woman claimed she had terminal cancer and created a GoFundMe page for a final Disney vacation. Cataldo, who does not have cancer, pocketed more than $10,000 before she was found out, federal prosecutors said. In May, she was indicted on fraud charges.

GoFundMe says the site verifies the identity of all campaign organizers and employs a team to monitor the platform for fraud. Campaigns involving a misuse of funds make up less than a tenth of one percent of all the funding requests on the site, and when they do happen, the money is returned in full to every donor.

Crowdfunding also raises thorny tax questions. Donations to individuals are not tax-deductible, as donations to traditional charities are. And while the IRS says those who receive money from crowdfunding can claim it as an untaxed gift, a handful of crowdfunders report receiving tax bills anyway. Money raised from crowdfunding can also affect a family’s eligibility for public assistance.

For Kayla Gaytan, the benefits of crowdfunding far outweighed any potential risks. The 30-year-old Kentucky mom and her husband Charles Gaytan, an active-duty military police officer at Fort Campbell, posted their plea for help on GoFundMe last September, when Kayla, a Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor, was five months pregnant with quadruplets. Her cancer was in remission, but doctors had given her only a 50% chance of living to see the babies enter kindergarten.

The Gaytans set their request at $5,000 to help pay for diapers, food and everyday expenses. Local media outlets picked up their story, and as it spread rapidly on Facebook, it became national news. In just a few months, more than 17,000 people were moved to contribute more than $1 million.

“It renewed our faith in humanity,” Gaytan says.

The family’s struggles, though, were not over. Gaytan’s cancer returned in the seventh month of her pregnancy and she was forced to deliver the quadruplets early so she could resume treatment. The babies — girls Lillian and Victoria, and boys Charles III and Michael — are all healthy, but Gaytan’s cancer has stopped responding to chemotherapy, so she is now preparing for a stem cell transplant in the hope of finding a cure.

The couple has put away most of the money they received from GoFundMe in a trust for their children’s college tuitions. They have used the rest for everyday necessities, relieving at least some of their short-term worries and allowing them to enjoy the moments they have with the quadruplets and their two grade-school kids.

“It makes me feel really good because let’s face it, I may not be here in eight to 10 years. Maybe not in five years,” Gaytan says. “If for some reason my husband wasn’t able to work, that would be OK for a little while. That would be one less worry they’re going to have.”

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