Book Riot Will Match Your Donation to Taller Salud for Hurricane Relief in Puerto Rico

From Wednesday, October twelfth to Tuesday, October 18th, Book Riot will likely be matching donations to Taller Sallud for hurricane aid in Puerto Rico, up to $2,500 USD. Read on to see why why we’ve chosen to assist this group and for directions on how to donate.

On September 18th, Hurricane Fiona made landfall in Puerto Rico. The Category 1 storm introduced document rainfall, flash flooding, mudslides, and sustained winds of 85 miles per hour, tearing off roofs, collapsing bridges, and ripping up sidewalks earlier than an island-wide energy outage left Puerto Rico’s 3.3 million residents in the darkish. While energy has been restored for some, up to 100,000 residents are nonetheless with out energy over two weeks later. According to the island’s well being division, as many as 25 deaths have been linked to the storm.

Sadly, Puerto Rico continues to be recovering from the final time a hurricane tore by the island. Fiona comes nearly precisely 5 years after Hurricane Maria left 3,000 Puerto Ricans lifeless and PR’s electrical energy system in shambles (a system that was fraught since earlier than both of the storms got here to cross). Read that once more: 3,000 lifeless, a complete island’s energy wiped. Maria was one of the crucial devastating pure disasters in 100 years, but the Trump administration’s response to the occasion was to withhold $20 billion in hurricane aid. In spite of this draconian abandonment of American residents in the wake of such profound tragedy, FEMA officers insist say they’ve realized an ideal deal from Maria and are in a a lot better place to reply to Fiona. Others insist there may be nonetheless a good distance to go each in preparedness and post-hurricane response.

Progress or not, hundreds of Puerto Ricans stay displaced and in want of rapid help. That’s why we at Book Riot have chosen to assist Taller Salud, a neighborhood based mostly feminist group devoted to bettering girls’s entry to well being care, to decreasing violence inside the neighborhood and to encourage financial development by training and activism in Puerto Rico.

Here’s just a little on their current efforts:

In 2017, Taller Salud was getting ready to hand out meals and provides in the wake of Hurricane Irma when phrase got here that Maria had intensified right into a Category 4 hurricane. The group upped its response and arranged neighborhood efforts and mutual help initiatives, even throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, together with the event of a neighborhood information for emergency preparedness.
Immediately following Irma and Maria, Taller Salud performed a housing examine in Loíza, a city on the northeastern coast of Puerto Rico hit notably arduous by the storms. When the hurricane season started in 2022, they launched the outcomes of the examine exhibiting that “100% of the homes in the 7 censused communities were in conditions of vulnerability to a natural phenomenon and 30.6% were still roofed with blue tarps.”
Taller Salud has publicly denounced the dearth of assist from the Department of Housing and authorities as an entire to guarantee Puerto Ricans’ proper to first rate housing, demanding “the immediate cancellation of the abusive contract of LUMA Energy, immediate adjustment in the electricity bill for consumers, a governance model that maintains the electricity service as a public good, and an urgent focus on the restructuring of current energy generation to renewable energy.”
Now in the wake of Fiona, Taller Salud has as soon as once more spearheaded a catastrophe response. They’ve opened two neighborhood kitchens to serve 500 meals a day, assessed important want by a neighborhood census device, and are advocating for inclusion of all municipalities (learn: not simply the wealthy tourist-heavy areas) in the catastrophe designation zone. They’ve additionally launched a Hurricane Relief Fund to present important items and consuming water to hundreds of households. More on that response in the video under.

Taller’s Salud’s attain and mission goes far past hurricane aid. They additionally function applications targeted on reproductive justice; political training and advocacy; secure restoration and housing campaigns; and youth justice. They are working to cut back gender-based violence affecting Afro-descendants and to dismantle poisonous masculinity. They are a pillar in their neighborhood working every day to deal with the inequities going through the residents of Puerto Rico, at this time and past the hurricane aftermath.

Today by Tueday, October 18th, Book Riot will likely be matching donations to Taller Sallud for hurricane aid in Puerto Rico, up to a max donation of $2,500 USD. To take part, add an image of your receipt for your donation in the shape under (you possibly can redact private data). Check again subsequent week, and we’ll add our receipt to present how a lot we’ve raised collectively! Thank you for becoming a member of us in this trigger, and click on right here to full your donation.