After 170 contributors donated within a week, he increased his initial $1,000 fundraising target to $5,000.
Although Kyrie Irving has made it a practice to donate to organizations and people with whom he has no personal affiliation, his efforts are sometimes overshadowed by unfavorable news. The Dallas Mavericks point guard has done it once more by giving a man who wants to support two organizations in Ghana and Nigeria $45,000. Irving sent a sizable gift to a guy who wanted to collect $5,000 to support an orphanage and a struggling school in Africa, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Kids and teachers display handmade signs thanking Mavericks guard Kyrie Irving after Irving donated $45,000 to a GoFundMe with the goal of building an orphanage in Ghana.(Courtesy Cameron Mofid)
The 22-year-old Miami resident claimed to have recently returned from an international journey that took him to West Africa on a GoFundMe page set up by Cameron Mofid. He indicated a wish to support a Ghanaian orphanage and a Nigerian school. After 170 contributors donated within a week, he increased his initial $1,000 fundraising target to $5,000. Mofid returned to the page over the weekend to check for updates and was astounded to find Irving’s generous donation. He noticed a $45,000 gift from “Kyrie” on the page.
“I actually thought it was a mistake or a scam, like spam mail,” Mofid told The Dallas Morning News. After doing some online research, Mofid saw that Irving had a history of making donations to causes he believed in. “That’s when I went into a state of shock,” Mofid said.
(Image: GoFundMe)
After it was established that Irving had indeed made the gift, he let Nigerians know about the size of it. Mofid claims that the excited students and instructors recorded movies thanking him and took photographs with a homemade sign designating the “Kyrie Irving Classroom” for the future school.
“It’s really amazing,” Mofid said. “I haven’t slept much because we’ve been figuring out all of our new plans. Initially, we had just raised enough money to buy backpacks and to buy the land for the new orphanage. His donation single-handedly will build the entire orphanage in Ghana. It will buy a water tank for the kids in Nigeria. They live in a village with little access to clean drinking water. And so we’ll be able to buy a water tank; we’ll be able to buy shoes for all the kids. And books. And we will build a new basketball court in [Irving’s] honor.”
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/MK35KBRF2RGS5JLJGOR7BZL5TQ.jpeg?resize=800%2C584&ssl=1)
