Oct 27 2016

Supporting Cliff Avril and New Story

new-story-logo-0f593f2209a239ab576199d1285834bb0ae513d1c5ce5ff0123118546dbd9f79Earlier this month Seattle Seahawks defensive end Cliff Avril announced that he would support building homes in Haiti – devastated most recently by hurricane Matthew. For every sack Avril gets this season he’s donating $6,000 which is enough to build a home that is both hurricane and earthquake proof.

The charity that Avril is doing this through – New Story – is one that my wife and I know well. It is actually a Y-Combinator company (was the first non-profit to go through the Y-Combinator program) and has developed a very impactful (and novel) model for supporting housing development in areas of need. Greeley and I have been supporting it for a few years. And, in case of funny coincidence, it turned out that my partner Brad was also involved as a member of the New Story advisory board.

Greeley and I were talking about Cliff Avril’s donation and ways we could further help New Story when she said: “why don’t we match Cliff and get a bunch of people to donate as well.” So we reached out to a few friends (and Seattle fans) to see what people thought. We decided to focus on the Seahawks remaining home games (there are 5; fortunately for me none are against either the Broncos or the Patriots) and see how much money we could raise. Very quickly we had commitments for over $13,300 per sack. And the number is going up daily as more and more people respond.

So let’s do this together. New Story is a fantastic charity and one that is not only doing good in the world, but also innovating on the non-profit model. Will you join us in supporting them? There are two ways to get involved. If you want to make a donation you can do so here (100% of these proceeds go directly to building homes). Or, better yet, join our Avril challenge. Just email me the amount you’re committing per sack. At the end of the season we’ll fulfill our pledges and I’ll be sure to announce the total (as we hit milestones I’ll update that here as well).