My charity aid organization, “Red Lightning” is mentioned in the first few pages of my book and I have been getting some questions about it, what we focus on, our purpose in disasters and even how to donate. Ever since returning from Japan there has been a tremendous amount of progress (and failures) behind the scenes.
One of the first things we did was set up the charity itself, and we are still waiting on our 5301c – status to be official, but as of today, yes, we have the capacity to accept donations. This is pretty huge, because when (not if) there is another major disaster I will have a channel help finance a trip. Both in Haiti and in Japan I found myself being limited when self funding, and having this ability changes everything. We see these future donations as being tax deductible for donators, as well as tax exempt for the charity.
Currently 100% of the book profits (minus printing and publishing expenses) are going directly to Red Lightning. As of this writing, I have no intention on receiving any “payment” from the charity, this is something I want to do 100% as volunteer and I hope I can maintain this as long as possible.
In terms of the actual products under development, I cannot get into specifics, but I have 2 different teams developing unique disaster aid solutions which eventually would be given away for free. For those of you who have read the book, you know what one of these products will do. Suffice it to say there is a HUGE hole in our current disaster response information systems. Red Lightning’s goal and purpose is to fill this gap as much as possible. I believe it will save a lot of lives. There has been a lot of expense, hard work and now troubleshooting to bring these ideas into fruition and I am starting to get really, really excited about it. When we actually release our first product (I would imagine in the next 5-6 months) I will probably hold a press conference. It will be a very big deal.
For now, we have a temporary website set up at www.RedLightning.com. Once we launch, we will have something much, much nicer, but at least this website gives a little bit of information, a video from what we did in Japan, as well as a link to donate on very bottom of the home page.
Click Here to Visit Red Lightning