Yahoo Finance Airbnb Co-Founder Helps Launch Company's $25M Fund to Support Refugees with $5M Donation
Courtesy of Joe Gebbia Joe Gebbia
Airbnb.org has announced the launch of a $25 million fund to benefit refugees and asylum seekers ahead of World Refugee Day this month.
The new initiative, which the company says will help people in need around the world, will kick off with a $5 million personal donation from co-founder Joe Gebbia. The 39-year-old recently contributed $25 million to two San Francisco charities working to end homelessness.
The Refugee Fund is part of Airbnb.org, an independent nonprofit, which launched in December and of which Gebbia is the chairman. The organization allows hosts on Airbnb to temporarily volunteer their homes to people in times of crisis, according to a news release.
"We'd been doing this for some time after natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods that suddenly displace people," Gebbia explains to PEOPLE. "Then seeing the incredible flow of refugees into Europe of course sparked a lot of questions. Could we help? Turns out we could."
"It's the moment when someone is granted asylum to a new country. They land, they're at the airport - where do they sleep that night? We could answer that question being experts in short-term accommodations," he adds. "We can provide that buffer and that welcome for a family getting resettled in a country, which gives them some time to find long term housing."
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The Refugee Fund will initially benefit programs run by nonprofit partner organizations in the United States, as well as Central and South America, the company said. This will include helping the groups meet the housing needs of refugees and people seeking asylum.
Courtesy of Joe Gebbia Joe Gebbia visits children in Africa
Gebbia says that for refugee stays, Airbnb is partnering with some of the nine organizations designated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the U.S. State Department to manage resettlement in the U.S., as well as refugees worldwide.
The entrepreneur says a statistic from the UNHCR - on which he serves on the Advisory Council - that showed that the number of displaced people in the world had grown to more than 70 million in 2015 "alarmed" him - especially when he realized that the figures would grow "upwards of hundreds of millions of people" by 2044.
To educate himself further, Gebbia traveled to Kenya and Rwanda alongside Malala Yousafzai and her Malala Fund as they worked on girls' education in refugee camps, an experience he calls "very eye-opening."
Courtesy of Joe Gebbia Joe Gebbia (L) and Malala Yousafzai (R)
A trip to Jordan two years later to meet with the UNHCR gave Gebbia "a stronger conviction that everyone deserves the right to fall asleep safe at night," he says.
"I thought to myself, 'This is going to be a problem of mine and my company's lifetime,'" he recalls. "How could we make a difference? How could we help? That's how we got into the refugee relief space."
Gebbia also shed light on the issue at the Met Gala in 2017, when he brought human rights activist and North Korean refugee Yeonmi Park as his guest.
Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com Joe Gebbia and Yeonmi Park
World Refugee Day is observed on June 20 and is an international day started by the United Nations to pay tribute to refugees across the globe. It was first established in 2001, on the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, according to The UN Refugee Agency.
Previously, Airbnb contributed $4 million to the International Rescue Committee after former President Donald Trump enacted measures to slash the number of refugees admitted into the country and temporarily denied entry to people from several Muslim-majority countries, the company said.
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Gebbia has also supported the Kevin Durant Foundation as they redevelop basketball and tennis courts in his hometown.
"We established Airbnb.org with the steadfast, distilled goal of connecting people to places in times of crisis," he says. "We have a proven model that works, so it's time to scale to help more people. The [$25 million] Refugee Fund will do exactly that."
According to Airbnb, hosts using their service have provided temporary accommodations to more than 20,000 refugees.
