As many of you know, an earthquake struck the area around Ishikawa and Niigata Prefecture on January 1, 2024. We (the renshuu family) live extremely close to where a lot of damage occurred, but we were fortunate to avoid any major damage.
In order to help, we offered 50% of all sales from renshuu in January 2024 to funds set up to help earthquake victims, as well as 100% of all sales from users who contacted us (there were a lot of you!!)
Saki (my wife, and renshuu's artist) and I were simply blown away by the response - and we want to share the final numbers with you!
We will be donating 2.8 million yen (that's just shy of $19,000 United States dollars) later this month! We've settled on two targets, and are sharing them in case any of you live in Japan and would like to make direct contributions.
What particularly impressed us with these funds is that they are managed by the city/prefecture, and 100% of all funds are used directly (including direct payments) to help those affected by the earthquake. As they are government units (compared to an NPO), this is an extension of their normal, tax-funded activities, and so no administrative fee is taken from the donations.
Again, we could not have done this without all of you, and we hope to make donations a regular part of our renshuu community.
