MERCER ISLAND, Wash. — A 20-year-old from Mercer Island is looking to help those impacted by the earthquake in Syria and Turkey.
"The distribution is huge, and these online tools can really have a real-world impact," said 20-year-old Avi Schiffmann, the president and founder of the nonprofit organization, Internet Activism, which is essentially a digital helping hand for those in need.
"For the last couple years, I've been working on Internet Activism related projects which means we kind of distribute online humanitarian tools across the internet to people in need when crisis strikes," said Schiffmann.
KING 5 introduced you to this Mercer Island man back in 2020. He made a website to track COVID-19, which he said was used by more than 600 million people, and his humanitarian work didn't stop there. Just last year when the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out he developed another platform to support refugees.
"Refugees could go on this platform and search where they are, where they're headed and see all these listings from host families and get in contact with them and that site housed over 100,000 refugees and saved many peoples' lives," said Schiffmann.
This week, Schiffmann and his team launched another website takeshelter.org to support those displaced by the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
"Enter what city they are in and where they're headed and see these listings from host families and get in contact with them and hopefully get housed,” said Schiffmann. “And we've seen over 50 people so far post amazing listings and also this site is translated to Turkish."
He said this is just the beginning to what he hopes will make a real difference.
"The thing is all these people impacted by earthquakes, wars, pandemics etc., they all got smart phones on them with internet access, and we can develop these tools and provide them instantly and I hope that more of these organizations kind of take notice of what we're doing here and start doing them themselves."