Caribbean con­sulates in New York con­vened an emer­gency meet­ing this week to dis­cuss a co­or­di­nat­ed ap­proach to re­lief ef­forts in the af­ter­math of ef­fu­sive erup­tions of the La Soufrière vol­cano that blan­ket­ed the is­land of St Vin­cent with ash and dis­placed thou­sands.

And while ef­forts in New York are cur­rent­ly apace to gath­er phys­i­cal sup­plies to send to St Vin­cent, New York-based Con­sul Gen­er­al of St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Howie Prince has is­sued a plea for mon­e­tary do­na­tions. His call comes af­ter the Unit­ed Na­tions in­di­cat­ed that it was set to launch a fund­ing ap­peal to help the is­land.

In an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Guardian, Mr Prince said his re­gion­al coun­ter­parts agreed to join his con­sulate’s week­end re­lief dri­ve and to set up a CARI­COM Go­FundMe ac­count, a US-based crowd­fund­ing plat­form, to raise mon­ey for St Vin­cent. A ‘me­diathon’ fundrais­er is al­so be­ing planned but a date has not yet been de­ter­mined. T&T’s Con­sul Gen­er­al in NY An­dre Laveau, in a brief tele­phone in­ter­view, con­firmed that he was present for part of the meet­ing.

The Caribbean of­fi­cials made the agree­ment as more New York­ers are be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly keen on do­nat­ing funds as op­posed to phys­i­cal items. Justin Miller, na­tive Vin­cent­ian and co-founder of the Vin­cy Strong Com­mit­tee in NYC, con­firmed that he has been bom­bard­ed with re­quests to re­ceive mon­e­tary do­na­tions in­stead of sup­plies. “I’m scep­ti­cal about a lot of the Go­FundMe cam­paigns that popped up. How­ev­er, a lot of peo­ple have asked us about ways to do­nate mon­ey so we start­ed ac­cept­ing,” he said.

Organisers of the Vincy Strong Committee collect essential supplies at their drop off location in Brooklyn, NY.

Picture Justin Miller

“It’s eas­i­er for some folks to do­nate cash be­cause they may be out of the coun­try or may not have the nec­es­sary trans­porta­tion to drop sup­plies off. We pre­fer the sup­plies be­cause it cuts out the step for us to go out and buy goods. How­ev­er, the cash helps us off­set some of the costs we per­son­al­ly in­cur.”

Al John­son, the co-founder of the full-ser­vice Caribbean ex­pe­ri­ence com­pa­ny Is­land Fa­nat­ics 3D, agreed. “Food and sup­plies col­lect­ed in the di­as­po­ra at this time may not reach SVG for an­oth­er few weeks. There­fore, mon­e­tary do­na­tions are great to cov­er the costs of the im­me­di­ate needs of the peo­ple of SVG. We need to re­mem­ber that sup­plies cost mon­ey and so do pack­ag­ing and ship­ping. Mon­e­tary do­na­tions col­lect­ed by the var­i­ous dri­ves can go to­wards pur­chas­ing items that were ei­ther not col­lect­ed or were col­lect­ed but in short sup­ply. Mon­ey can al­so be used to cov­er pack­ag­ing and ship­ping costs.”

Us­ing US-based crowd­fund­ing plat­forms such as Go­FundMe, how­ev­er, re­quires the on­line or­gan­is­er to have a US so­cial se­cu­ri­ty num­ber. Kha­dine Sealy, T&T di­rec­tor of Re­al Help­ing Hands–a Caribbean-fo­cused crowd­fund­ing plat­form–ar­gues that the Caribbean needs more au­ton­o­my when it comes to the re­gion’s char­i­ty and pub­lic ser­vice in­fra­struc­ture.

“All of these crowd­fund­ing ef­forts are ad­mirable, but we can’t re­ly on these US plat­forms. We need Caribbean au­ton­o­my. Caribbean or­gan­i­sa­tions like Re­al Help­ing Hands is dif­fer­ent from US-based plat­forms be­cause we are specif­i­cal­ly fo­cused on the Caribbean peo­ple. Set­ting up these cam­paigns from US plat­forms means it has to be done from the US. Re­al Help­ing Hands pro­vides a way for Caribbean cit­i­zens to en­gage in on­line fundrais­ing with­out im­pos­ing such re­stric­tions on our peo­ple,” Sealy said in a tele­phone in­ter­view.

Sealy added that the peo­ple of St Vin­cent can eas­i­ly and swift­ly set up on­line cam­paigns since they know bet­ter than any­one what the needs are on the ground. “Through man­ag­ing their own cam­paigns, they can make up­dates and con­tin­ue shar­ing that cam­paign to their net­works and their net­works' net­works.”

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley chaired a vir­tu­al meet­ing of CARI­COM lead­ers on Thurs­day to co­or­di­nate a large re­gion­al re­sponse in sup­port of the gov­ern­ment of St Vin­cent.