Advisory: Please note that this post is about the Pulse Nightclub Massacre on June 12, 2016. It may contain sensitive and difficult to read content. Post written with narrator’s consent.
Ida Eskamani is formerly from Equality Florida, she went on to work with Representative Smith’s office as chief of staff.
Equality Florida was born at a time when no one was investing in the south when it came to LGBTQ rights. The founders felt if they build it they will come. The organization was launched 20 ears ago. There is nothing else like it. It was grass roots funded.
Ida got back from vacation on June 11, 2016, the day before the shooting at Pulse. It was the first vacation she had taken in 10 years. At 3AM she woke up from the jet lag. There were a lot of notifications on her phone. It looked like a shooting but she wasn’t aware of the severity of what was unfolding. She sent an e-mail to staff to let them know what was happening. She drifted back to sleep. When she woke up again, it was 6AM. That is when she realized this was something much more horrific. She lives about 2 miles from Pulse and she could hear helicopters overhead. The TV stayed on all day.
For the next three weeks she didn’t sleep. She was working non stop. She may never again feel the the way she did that Saturday night before Pulse happened. The first text she got from Equality Florida was to ask if all the staff were OK. All 5 staff in the Orlando area were OK. At 9AM there was a staff conference call. They agreed to draft a statement and make people aware of all the resources that were becoming available. They decided they needed to launch a fundraising page. Donors were already coming to the organization.
She wasn’t sure what roll she could play and she had to go to an event in Jacksonville Florida. Around 11AM she realized the no one had created the Go Fund Me Page yet, so she did it. She had never launched a Go Fun Me Page before. She wanted to connect it to Equality Florida’s page. But you can not connect it to a page, it has to be a person. She put a goal of $100,000. It was clear that there would be major gaps in support and anything Equality Florida could do, they wanted to do.
On the road to Jacksonville, Her boss was driving and she was checking her laptop and found her e-mail was flooding with messages. People were asking if the fundraising page was real. As they were driving she updated the description on Go Fund Me. She responded to everyone letting them know it was real and any contribution would help. By the time the Jacksonville event was over they had already hit the goal of $100,000 so they upgraded the goal to $200,000. Then it increased to $500,000 and then to 1 million. It just kept growing. It was the fasted page to reach 1 Million in Go Fund Me’s history. It was the first ever to reach 2 Million. It raised 7.8 million. Offline an additional 1.2 Million was raised. About 9.5 Million dollars were raised in total. Those donations came from 120 countries and over 120,000 people. It became known as the Pulse Victims Fund.
She suddenly had to field tons of press interviews. Press was never ending. During the dark time she would read the comments on the Go Fund Me Page where people expressed love and warmth. A little kid donated from a bakery sale to celebrities. All these gay bars had fundraisers and donated to the page. It was so powerful. Equality Florida was not in charge of dispersing the funds. The goal was for the money to go directly to victim’s families and survivors.