As far as fantasy worlds go, Patrick Rothfuss has built a pretty great one. His Kingkiller Chronicle books (The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, with a third on the way) have earned him a fan following that's not only sizable, but devoted. So when he nonchalantly posted on his blog that he'd like to raise money for Heifer International, it exploded into something far bigger than the author had intended or expected.
"I certainly didn't plan on actually founding a charity," Rothfuss told me over the phone last week. He initially just wrote a blog post saying, "Hey, here's my favorite charity. If you guys want to donate some money, I'll match you dollar for dollar."
"I thought I might get lucky and raise maybe $5,000 for a charity I love," he said. "But instead everyone surprised me and we raised $50,000. Then I matched it. I bankrupted myself," he says laughing.
"It made me realize that there's a lot of people out there that want to do good in the world, and sometimes they just need an excuse or reason," Rothfuss said.
So he started Worldbuilders, a charity group built on the premise of geeks doing good. "I like to think of Worldbuilders as a place where geeks of all creeds and nations can come together and build a better place," he says.
To date, Rothfuss says they've raised $3.5 million since the beginning of Worldbuilders.
The money goes to Heifer International, an organization that strives to end poverty and hunger not by giving people fish, but by making them fishermen.
As an example, Rothfuss said, "Heifer International will provide a family with a flock of chickens, which provides not just food, not just good protein, not just more chickens but it's effectively a small business that provides money. And if you're not constantly struggling for food, that means you can send your children to school. And then your children can get their jobs and the entire community benefits from that. It has huge, long-lasting, far-reaching effects into the future, that's the kind of charity we want to back here [at Wordbuilders]."
A lot of people haven't heard of Heifer International, he says. Some of his earliest knowledge of the charity came from a children's book.
"It's called Beatrice's Goat," he told me. "It's a true story about a little girl called Beatrice who learns her family is going to get the gift of a goat. She's very skeptical, thinking, 'Why do we need a goat? Will the goat give tin for the roof? Will the goat help my little sister be warm at night?" And the mother says, 'Just watch, just see.'
"And so Beatrice makes a little pen for the goat and they feed the goat. Then they drink the milk and they sell the milk then at the end they have enough money that Beatrice gets to buy books and a uniform and she gets to go to school, something she's always wanted to do. And it really opened my eyes to how something like that works. How $100 doesn't just feed somebody for a year, it changes a family's life forever. Because that goat has babies and they give those babies away to their neighbors and then, it just cascades into the future."
Beatrice Biira, according to Heifer's website, earned her Master's degree from the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service in 2010. It sounds like that goat took her a long way.
One way Worldbuilders raises money for Heifer is through week-long fundraisers. The Indiegogo page for Geeks Doing Good 2015 went live on the morning of June 1, and within hours they blew past their initial goal of raising $25,000. All week they will be raising money by selling autographed books, bundles of tabletop games, copper dice, t-shirts, calendars and more.
Many geek culture celebrities also contribute in various ways, like donating items for the fundraiser, committing to funding "stretch goals" or just goofing off on camera to help raise awareness for the charity. For example, last year Austin-based host and comedian Brian Brushwood taught Patrick Rothfuss how to eat fire. In another video, popular YouTube star Hank Green played an acoustic version of Taylor Swift's Shake it Off.
You can contribute to the 2015 Geeks Doing Good Indiegogo campaign -- and get a lot of cool swag while doing so -- through the week of June 1.
