Cash donations are pouring in from around the globe as the campaign for social change enters its third week. Approximately $35,000 has been sent to the masses, camped in lower Manhattan. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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Another $30,000 was collected by the fund-raising website Kickstarter, which enabled the group to produce 50,000 copies of a newspaper called The Occupied Wall Street Journal on Saturday.
“[The donations] are coming from everywhere,” said Cooper Union student Victoria Sobel, 21, a core member of the finance committee managing the funds.
“I’m sure we’re on the cusp of much larger donations.”
Protesters say they have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of generosity for their loosely organized movement, which began as a sit-in against corporate greed and morphed into a mass demonstration against social injustice.
The donations come in all sizes – from a few dollars delivered by hand or mail, to one group of 144 people who pooled their money and sent $5,000 online, Sobel said.
Internet pledges arrive via two main websites: occupywallst.org was registered July 14, two months before the demonstrations began, by a Los Angeles privacy service that shields the owner’s identity.
The second, nycga.cc, was registered Sept. 11 by Brooklyn resident Vladimir Teichberg, records show.
The Alliance for Global Justice, a nonprofit with 501c3 status, helped Occupy Wall Street to collect tax-exempt donations and open a credit union account to centralize funds.
The Washington-based organization’s most recent 2009 tax return has revenues of $843,547, including contributions and grants of $789,509, records show.
Pete Dutro, 36, a business technology management student at NYU-Poly has also joined the finance committee and said several heavy-hitter benefactors have contacted Occupy Wall Street to find out ways to give financial support.
The committee requested they hold off donating money until mechanisms are in place to handle the cash, Dutro said.
Any of the many organizational committees seeking to spend more than $100 – for, say, blankets or food – has to get approval from the hyper-democratic general assembly, the de facto leadership body for the protest.
Yet the finance brains behind the movement have ambitions of giving each entity its own budget. Some money will be used to pay bail for arrested demonstrators.
“We want to make sure we have ways of using the money effectively,” Dutro said.
“We are trying to be transparent about it.”
