A Light For Darfur
Boston Globe, MA
December 22, 2007
While George Clooney and Don Cheadle were in Rome collecting Men of Peace Awards for their efforts on behalf of Darfur, Jonah Burke was sitting quietly at his computer in Western Mass. A former Microsoft employee, Burke is the builder of the Darfur Wall, an affecting website that's raised $80,000 for Darfur relief organizations. "I thought the site might help get a more emotional reaction from people," said Burke, who's working on the project with Eric Reeves, a Smith College professor and expert on the Sudan. "I thought it'd be a more persuasive way to visualize the problem." There are 400,000 numbers on the online wall, each representing a person killed in Darfur. By donating $1 or more, visitors to darfurwall.org can light a number, turning it from dark gray to brilliant white. (The wall's first number was lit by Peter Burchhardt of Shenzhen, China.) "I was IMing with Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, who said he really liked the site. . . . He used a lot of exclamation points," said Burke. The goal is to raise $400,000, lighting every number.
December 22, 2007
While George Clooney and Don Cheadle were in Rome collecting Men of Peace Awards for their efforts on behalf of Darfur, Jonah Burke was sitting quietly at his computer in Western Mass. A former Microsoft employee, Burke is the builder of the Darfur Wall, an affecting website that's raised $80,000 for Darfur relief organizations. "I thought the site might help get a more emotional reaction from people," said Burke, who's working on the project with Eric Reeves, a Smith College professor and expert on the Sudan. "I thought it'd be a more persuasive way to visualize the problem." There are 400,000 numbers on the online wall, each representing a person killed in Darfur. By donating $1 or more, visitors to darfurwall.org can light a number, turning it from dark gray to brilliant white. (The wall's first number was lit by Peter Burchhardt of Shenzhen, China.) "I was IMing with Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, who said he really liked the site. . . . He used a lot of exclamation points," said Burke. The goal is to raise $400,000, lighting every number.
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