Colorado woman raises nearly $900K for Club Q victims after setting goal of $5K
A Colorado businesswoman who hoped to raise $5,000 for victims of the deadly shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub last month has brought in nearly 175 times that amount.
Faith Haug felt she needed to do something to help after the Nov. 19 massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs left five dead, more than a dozen wounded and an entire community in mourning.
Haug — whose LGBTQ-owned auto repair shop, Good Judy Garage, is located near Denver — couldn’t find a fund-raiser supporting victims of the tragedy, so she created her own last month, she told CBS News.
Her GoFundMe page has now raised more $870,000 from nearly 20,000 donors, and she promises 100% of the money will support victims of the shooting.
“When I started this fund two weeks ago, I intended to offset a few of the expenses victims would face, hopefully. The original goal was only $5k, but [the] community generosity far exceeded that in mere hours,” Haug wrote in an update this week.
After the success of her fund-raising campaign, Haug asked the National Compassion Fund, a nonprofit started by victims of the 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., to help administer the money.
The donations will benefit families of victims and those who were at the bar and are suffering psychological trauma, the compassion fund says.
The organization will set up a committee that includes mass shooting victims and health professionals to discuss how to distribute the money, Haug told CBS. The group will also host a public town hall to hear from the victims to make the process transparent.
“It really makes a streamlined and clear process, and it’s public,” Haug told CBS. “It’s literally money to their bank account or into their hands to use as they see fit, and really that’s what it’s about is making sure they get 100% of the funds that are donated and nobody is telling them how they have to use them.”
On Tuesday, police charged shooting suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich with 305 criminal counts, including first-degree murder and hate crimes.
