New York City, New York Nov 4, 2019 (Issuewire.com) - There are so many urgent issues facing our world today. If you could help solve any two environmental problems, what would they be?
The Miami-based charity foundation, Karmagawa, has recently produced two separate film documentaries that focus on the devastation involving the endangered rhinos and coral reefs of the world.
The charity’s co-founders, Timothy Sykes and Mattheau Abad, both traveled the globe to appear in these documentaries and bring these issues to light. Their goal is to raise awareness of these issues by showing their documentaries to as many people as possible. That’s why the documentaries are both free to view online.
Karmagawa’s first documentary was about saving the endangered rhinos that are threatened by poachers and trophy hunters. After the documentary was posted on Instagram, it gained over 30 million hits and 6 million shares within a few short months.
"It created this viral loop that just kept going, and more and more people were shocked about it," Sykes said about the rhino documentary. "That's the future of social media and the future of business online.” The rhino documentary helped raise seven-figures for various charities involved with the rhino endangerment issue on top of Karmagawa’s $250,000 in donations so far to help save the rhino.
After that, Karmagawa created a charity project called SafeTheReef. This was the next big project they pursued and it’s all about the effort to save our dying coral reefs in the oceans. Since coral reefs produce more oxygen for the planet than all the trees combined, Sykes and Abad felt like it was an extremely important issue to raise.
This time, they recruited Hawaiian filmmaker Amir Zakeri to be the man behind the camera for their newest documentary, also called Save the Reef. The trio went on a journey to film dying coral reefs and to ask the experts about the negative effects of their endangered state. They traveled to Hawaii, South Africa, Seychelles, Belize, Tahiti, and Australia for this journey. Their goal was to make an eye-opening but also encouraging documentary that would get people to care about coral reefs and learn why we need to save them.
“People are tired of hearing about everything that’s wrong with the world. They want to know what they can do,” Zakeri commented about what led him to film the documentary. “I don’t want me or my kids to need an oxygen mask just to walk outside. If we come together to solve this issue, we can solve any problem in the world.”
The SafeTheReef documentary has gained over 4 million hits within its first 120 days on YouTube and so far at least $90,000 has been donated to 3 different charities that support the safety and restoration of coral reefs in Tahiti and Australia. The Karmagawa team is not expecting any specific donation amount to be raised because of their documentaries, their objective was to deliver the message of what is going on so that people have an awareness of the issue. If people have the means to contribute something, then that would always be appreciated, but it’s more important they share what they learn with their social media followers!
“We want to make charity appeal to people. When people think about charity, it turns them off,” Abad said. “They don't want to hear about just donating or financially giving. But with our end, we don't ask people for money. We want to build a charitable community for cool people to be a part of and inspire their followers.” For more information, please email: tim@karmagawa.com
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Karmagawa tim@karmagawa.com
