Danny first heard about the genocide in Darfur when he attended a conference of young activists at Cincinnati’s National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Learning about this tragedy brought back memories of his visit to the Holocaust Museum a few years earlier and the sad realization that evil on such a large scale still existed. He soon began working on a fundraising event for Darfur at the University of Cincinnati with several other high school students, an experience that Danny says convinced him that “the world is everyone’s responsibility in which to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comfortable.”
Danny set out to continue this mission at his own school, St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. The question became: what could a small group of students do to create a successful fundraiser? After some brainstorming, the idea for Donuts for Darfur emerged. “When I saw the hunger-driven damage that a school of 1,600 teenage boys could do to a $1 donut stand in only three hours, I knew I had struck gold,” Danny explains. “St. Xavier had an appetite for breakfast matched only by its concern for international social justice.” The overwhelming success of the fundraiser turned the onetime event into an ongoing initiative that has raised over $7,000. All of the proceeds go to Jewish World Watch’s Solar Cooker Project.
Not only has Donuts for Darfur raised money, but it has created an opportunity at the school for dialogue and awareness around what is happening in Sudan. The fundraiser has become the basis for the establishment of a student-founded, student-run charity at St. Xavier called Concordia Humana. Danny and the group have recently incorporated Concordia Humana under the state of Ohio so they can spread Donuts for Darfur and other global justice projects to various universities around the country. Already they have plans to form chapters at Notre Dame and Harvard. The program will also continue at St. Xavier High School, where it all began.
For more information, please visit www.concordiahumana.org
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