Our thoughts are with all of the victims of the 100-year Colorado Flood.
Despite the overwhelming need and offers to help today, it is surprisingly hard to find a way to plug in or to find available resources for help. Here are a few things we’ve found:
Need help?
- Here is a list of responding agencies and a list of Colorado Flood resources.
- Additionally, my best suggestion is to post your need for help on twitter by using hashtags (#coloradoflood, #boulderflood, #fortcollinsflood, etc.) so people can see it. (Example: Need water and help pulling up carpet in Niwot for #coloradoflood. Contact me if you are nearby.). There are tons of people on twitter waiting to help (myself included). If you don’t have a twitter account, sign up or contact us and we’ll do our best to post it for you.
Want to help?
- The best way to help is to make a monetary donation:
- Foothills United Way and The Community Foundation of Boulder County are partnering to raise money through the Foothills Flood Relief Fund.
- The Longmont Community Foundation is raising money through the St. Vrain Flooding Relief Fund.
- HelpColoradoNow lists several other agencies to give to.
- Sign up to volunteer at HelpColoradoNow.org. There will be many needs for help long after the TV cameras stop covering this. Sign up now to help in the future.
- The Well is working with the National Guard and they need people to volunteer to do laundry and bring snacks.
- Are you an accredited investor? Since our businesses and homeowners will have far more need than our banks, FEMA and charities will be able to provide, the Impact Angel Group is organizing ideas and interest for making private loans and investments to support homeowners and businesses affected by the flood. If you have any interest in angel investing to support the flood, please contact us.
Other ideas? Please leave a comment.
re: “Since our businesses and homeowners will have far more need than our banks, FEMA and charities will be able to provide”
While I grasp with the need for capital for disaster relief and encourage those who can to help, there are many traditional sources of capital available and it isn’t clear yet that there will be any lack of funds. Perhaps there will be, but at the moment I suspect this is based more on fear than evidence. There are many more people that are comfortable with the notion of traditional loans and able to provide them than there are those that are comfortable with high risk angel type investing. I’d suggest not neglecting the needs of the future in a rush to focus on the present.
re: “If you have any interest in angel investing to support the flood,”
I will just note the minor nitpick that it isn’t “high impact” angel type investing which focuses on larger and higher impact tasks rather than immediate needs. Everyone needs to make tradeoffs between focusing on the present vs. the future in different aspects of their lives, including investing. The returns on investment might allow you to help even more people in the future and allow others to do so as well.
Investments in more traditional angel risk capital investments may for say a medical device lead to lives being saved in the future and be of more benefit to the world than immediate help now which others who aren’t comfortable with angel investing can provide. Or another product might reduce costs in some sector of the economy which helps the poor (which indirectly improves health and life expectancy, and their savings to let them deal with any future crisis). Improving the economy leads more money to be available to provide better infrastructure, etc. There are many ways to help the world, and most people are focused on the present. Angels focused on the future need to be careful to not lose sight of the need for them, there are far too few as it is.
Hello. Thank you so much for your critical thinking.
A few thoughts:
1) We hope that FEMA and other funding sources will be enough, but we’d like to be prepared if that is not the case. It takes a fair amount of time to mobilize private investors, so we are just trying to be proactive.
2) We are not going to stop or slow our efforts to fund other high-impact opportunities. In fact, I am reviewing a medical device opportunity right now. This is simply a parallel effort, not an either/or.
3) I understand your point about focusing on larger and higher impact tasks rather than immediate needs. However, we have to have a strong startup community to foster high-impact startups and our startup community has taken a big hit. There many damaged startup businesses that will likely be unable to secure bank loans, etc. because they are high-risk startups. And there are entrepreneurs, lawyers, venture capitalists and more in those homes that were destroyed. I don’t think rebuilding our community is losing site of the future, it’s simply re-laying the groundwork so high-impact startups can thrive.
Again, thank you for your critical thinking. We are still working out all of the details of this and we’d be happy to keep you apprised of our plans. We will also be soliciting feedback from our startup community leaders and would invite your participation if you’d like to contact us through our contact us page.