Australia Needs Our Help!

Large parts of Australia are being consumed by absolutely devastating bush-fires. These fires raging across Australia are being dubbed ‘Black Summer,’ and the bush-fires themselves are estimated to be the worst in recorded history in Australia. The fires are being fueled by a combination of extreme heat, prolonged drought and strong winds. Record breaking heat has been seen across all states and with well over a month left of summer more heat is expected.

Dozens of people have lost their lives so far and many are still missing. Thousands of homes have been destroyed including large farmlands. More than 20 million acres of land has been destroyed, 350 million tonnes of CO2 has been released, and an estimated 1.2+ billion animals have died. 

As you can imagine an emergency of this scale affects not only the victims of the fires, homes are destroyed, land/crops destroyed, as well as huge devastation to the wildlife and their habitats. We recently launched OpenX in Australia and have a team of great employees that live in Sydney who are not in harm’s way but we want to support Australia in any way we can. 

To help with relief efforts, the team in Australia has put together two GoFundMe campaigns to collect donations and OpenX will match donations up to a total $10,000 — so together we can raise $20K or even more! The two GFM funds are for the Australian Red Cross and for WIRES which is focused on wildlife.

Here are the links to donate to the charity you would like to support:

• WIRES – Wildlife Support Fund for rescuing, RE-homing, care and aid to animals affected (https://www.gofundme.com/f/openx-for-wires)
• Australian Red Cross – Supporting victims with evacuations, food, shelter, water, setting up relief centers and helping victims rebuild. (https://www.gofundme.com/f/openx-for-australian-red-cross)