HURRICANE FLORENCE
For many of us around the country, September meant going back to school, turning on the football games and hunting down new Instant Pot soup recipes. But for hundreds of thousands in the Carolinas and on the eastern seaboard, it meant preparing for and enduring a literal disaster as Hurricane Florence struck the coast. Their ordeal is still far from over.
As Florence made landfall, readers of Microsoft News were quick to show their solidarity and support by doing something to help. You didn’t just skim the latest storm story and move on to the next article. You stopped and took a minute to make a donation to the four phenomenal aid organizations that we campaigned for, and you made a huge difference.
On the Saturday after Florence hit, you donated $25,000. Today that number has reached nearly $160,000.
You gave to major, trusted first responders like the Red Cross. We also partnered with Team Rubicon, an organization that Microsoft is proud to support in its work to train military veterans in disaster relief response. The North Carolina Community Foundation, a local state philanthropic group that focuses on long-term recovery efforts, was also a major recipient of your generosity.
In a recent message, Team Rubicon’s Matt Colvin reminded us that the need is far from met. “As you have undoubtedly seen, the media is moving away from the current conditions in North Carolina and South Carolina following Hurricane Florence. The need in the Carolinas is critical and Team Rubicon is just getting started.”
Now is still a great time to contribute. And Team Rubicon is always recruiting volunteers to deploy to disasters around the country, whether you’re a military vet or civilian.
CANCER AWARENESS
September was also a big month at Microsoft News for raising awareness and money in the fight against cancer. MSN’s Health & Fitness team partnered with the American Cancer Society and its other great content providers to create some great packages of articles, slideshows and more that were both informative and inspiring.
From personal stories of cancer survivors to easy ways you can help like the 30-Minute Challenge, we hope that these pieces helped make you smarter about cancer. Hard as they are to read, we learned a lot from articles like this one, about a young girl whose last hope is an experimental treatment for a rare cancer that gets a painfully small share of research money.
The nearly $7,000 you helped us raise contributed to both research for new treatments and cures as well as support for the many families touched by cancer.
With an expected 1.7 million new cancer cases expected to be diagnosed in 2018, there is so much more we can still do. You can make a donation now.
Thank you for being an active part of the Microsoft News community and joining us in our efforts to do some good every day. We can’t do it without you.
