Philanthropist Bethenny Frankel has been doing all she can to support Ukraine.
She has been working through her BStrong Foundation to provide both survival and hygiene kits to Ukrainian refugees who have fled their war-torn country, which was invaded by Russia four weeks ago.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Frankel revealed that most of the life-changing donations her foundation has received are small donations from individuals.
Bethenny Frankel Reveals Small, Individual Donations Are Changing Lives
Frankel has now distributed over 100,000 relief kits which equals about $10M dollars in aid. Although she said that they are dealing “in very large-scale donations from major companies,” a majority of the donations that are making a real difference are the “lunch money” donations from individuals who are turning out their own pockets to help.
“The majority of the $15 to probably $20 million now in cash is from $5 and $10 donations from individuals,” she explained. “There’s one person who made a seven-figure donation, and one person who made a couple thousand dollar donation, but the rest is really just [enough for] a meal and it’s changing lives.”
She has also been working with “Dancing with the Stars” alum Maksim Chmerkovskiy who escaped Ukraine and made it back to his family in L.A. He has since headed back to Poland to help other refugees.
She said that Maksim has “come to see our facilities and our operation. It’s pretty extraordinary. Basically what he’s doing is helping us raise awareness. He’s very motivated. And very curious. And he’s got the bug to help his people.”
Bethenny Frankel Explains The Foundation For The BStrong Initiative
Frankel explained that she had started the initiative to assist in “crisis situations.”
“I always wanted to do something that could be immediate: immediate impact, immediate relief for people who are at phase zero, where it’s life or death,” she explained. “So that was for Hurricane Harvey relief; moving into Guatemala after a volcano erupted, moving into Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Australia, Haiti, New Orleans, Tennessee, North Carolina, Surfside and the Bronx fires’ the PPE crisis, and now this.”
“It’s usually disaster relief,” she added. “This is a unique evolution and outlier because it is a disaster, but it’s not a natural disaster like a hurricane or a volcano or an earthquake. But it differs greatly in that it hasn’t stopped. Those natural disasters usually have stopped and then you’re dealing with the aftermath and picking up the pieces, and rebuilding. But in this case, it’s a treadmill; you are dealing with certain people’s aftermath and helping them pick up the pieces and relocate and rebuild. You’re going back in. You’re extracting people out.”
Bethenny Frankel Explains How Donations Are Being Used
“We have a warehouse in Poland and one in Hungary to distribute aid throughout this crisis and throughout different parts of Romania, Hungary, and Poland,” she explained. “And then there’s another tier that is the relocation of refugees, which is very detailed. The entire effort will exceed $100 million so that’s extraordinary because we’re only two weeks into this.”
“We have a warehouse in Miami — in Doral, Florida — that is year-round,” she added. “So that is how we started the first commitment of $10 million dollars in aid to ship containers to Poland. But as this thing got exponentially greater, it’s not economically sound to be shipping aid from the U.S. when we’re so credible and immediate that we have so many European contacts. We have people like Levi’s and Goya and all these different brands that have European factions and they have all been sending us aid. So that’s how we’ll have these two stocked warehouses that will mimic what we have in Miami.”
“Now we’ve literally built like a mini FEMA out in Hungary and Poland to distribute aid to different hospitals and churches and groups,” she revealed. “We do everything from food, to kid supplies, to operating tables and wheelchairs. We are a place where many of the other organizations that you hear of are donating to. They will come to us to get aid; we’re sort of like the not-for-profit, Costco/Amazon model there.”
“That’s how you get to $100 million in aid, because of all of this aid that is constantly coming into us which is something that we started in Hurricane Maria — we amassed aid from all over the nation. People raise money and aid really quickly, and then they don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “They get excited. They want to say the big numbers, but then they don’t know exactly how to distribute it. That’s what we excel at. We are taking people’s aid and we’re distributing it.”
