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At first, Charlotte Willner wanted to raise $1,500 on Facebook — enough to let one immigrant parent who had been separated from their child make bond. So, she and her husband Dave Willner set up a fundraiser on Facebook, “Reunite an immigrant parent with their child,” benefitting the Texas nonprofit RAICES.
By the end of the first day, they had raised $120,000. At the time of this writing, they have raised more than $20 million.
“The common question we get now is ‘Oh my gosh, can they use all this money?’ The answer, resoundingly, is yes,” Charlotte said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “RAICES is, has been from the very beginning, so committed to sharing these resources with every organization in Texas. They can now provide lawyers to a bunch of the pro bono projects. The process of reuniting these families is going to be extremely expensive.”
She and her husband both have large networks on Facebook — about 1,700 friends apiece, which they attributed to having worked together at the company. And a crucial moment in the fundraiser was when one of Charlotte’s acquaintances offered, out of the blue, to match donations up to $25,000 — the first of many match offers to follow.
Just had Dave and Charlotte Wilner, who have raised an astonishing $19 million in one week for @RAICESTEXAS in a Facebook fundraising effort to help separated immigrant families. I just pledged $10k to match donations, so go here and make me pay: https://t.co/ZJMkNrZY3q pic.twitter.com/EmS2SA2kCs
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) June 22, 2018
“That matching process was something that really pushed us into virality,” Charlotte said. “I was able to go to all the people I know who don’t have $25,000, but do have $25, and say ‘Hey, you can donate and have $50 in your name.’ I was astonished at how fast people started sharing it because they knew they were going to be able to have more impact collectively.”
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The people who’ve donated to the campaign come from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and 26 other countries, Dave Willner said. And many of them are now asking what else they can do; although the Willners and a small army of volunteers are figuring out how to organize volunteers and voter registration drives, they also don’t want to lose focus of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that brought the donors together.
“We’ve been very mindful to keep what we ask these people to focus on very narrow, so that the consensus can stay very broad,” Dave said. “The position that toddlers should be with their parents is the closest thing I can think to a self-evident truth that exists. The corollary that no toddler should be in prisons, even with their parents, for indefinite periods of time, is the next closest thing.”
“I think, and we are assembling this airplane as we are flying it, but we are going to try to keep the momentum very tightly focused on those two points,” he added. “Even with all this goodwill, even with all this money, fixing this is going to take a long time. It should never have happened in the first place and we need to ensure that it never happens again.”
Although they both used to work at Facebook, Charlotte Willner now works at Pinterest and Dave Willner is now at Airbnb. On the new podcast, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky also joined Swisher in studio to talk about how he and other tech leaders are weighing their political responsibilities in the Trump era.
“I think we’re realizing, all of us tech founders and CEOs, that we probably have a greater responsibility than we used to think we had,” Cheksy said. “When I came to Silicon Valley in 2007, people said my responsibility was to build a great company, to grow and to get return for investors. They didn’t say, ‘You have to speak out on social issues and try to make society better.’”
His first overtly political move was to offer free housing to people displaced by the Muslim travel ban in 2017; later that year, Airbnb kicked out users who were renting its hosts’ homes to hold white supremacist afterparties for the rally in Charlottesville, Va. Although he was initially nervous about how those decisions might affect Airbnb’s business, Chesky said the “right people” have doubled down in response.
He praised his employees who have spoken out on issues like the immigration crisis and Black Lives Matter, and said Dave Willner’s work on the fundraiser proves that they can do more than just make noise.
“Airbnb can take zero credit for his generosity,” Chesky said. “I do want to take credit for hiring people like that. And I do think that we attract a lot of great people, and Dave is one of those people.”
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
