In celebration of Black History Month, Urban Triage has launched the High Five for Black History campaign for the month of February. During this campaign, the organization will provide five fun facts daily about Black history and innovation while raising funds for Urban Triage’s operations.
“We’re really just tying this all together to history using the concept that when you give a high five, it’s really a celebration,” Diana Shinall, director of development at Urban Triage, tells Madison365. “It’s about something that has been accomplished, something that’s feeling good and moving forward. And so we’re using that concept around Black history and sharing information because some people don’t know certain facts. There are so many things that Black people have created and initiated and done, and people just aren’t aware. And so during Black History Month, we’re just celebrating that. But in conjunction with that, we’re asking you to partner with us and provide the $5 donation to help us continue to move the programs that we’re offering here at Urban Triage.”
Urban Triage’s mission is to foster, develop, and strengthen Black economic power, Black families’ self-sufficiency, community leadership, advocacy, and family success through transformational education, psycho-education, community engagement, trauma recovery, and cultural heritage.
The organization’s request during Black History month is simple: anyone who is able to and desires to can donate $5 to Urban Triage and encourage others through their social media platforms.
“We’re celebrating with this high-five symbolism. We’re celebrating our past, our present and our future,” Shinall says. The five facts in the Black history information provided will be related to the past, present, or future. “And what we’re asking the community to do in partnership with us is to donate $5.”
It’s a mostly social media campaign. Urban Triage is using social media platforms to get the word out – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And they are asking their supporters to do the same.
“We’re asking our family and friends to get involved and it’s really on the concept of crowd sharing,” Shinall says. “So if I share it with you, you share with all your contacts on your social media page and I share it online and then someone from your pages says, ‘Hey, this is cool.’ And so this way we can reach mass numbers through social media.”
Three times a week, Urban Triage will change the facts it sends out around Black history. “We’ve even found history makers that are African American here in Madison and so we put those people in the facts,” Shinall says.
“Another creative thing our marketing specialists came up with is using all of these facts that people are getting and encouraging them to host a Black history night in their own family or in their own workplaces. And for these facts, people can share them with each other, and then everybody donates $5. So your company can be represented with this,” Shinall says. “Even if we have a small company, that’s only $25 and that’s OK. Because again, the concept is about taking the small gesture of kindness and putting it together with a mass number and producing a larger-scale impact. In some cases, we’ve shown where you think $5 is small, but really $5 together becomes large.
There are still 16 days left to donate through the High Five for Black History campaign and Shinall is hoping that the community really turns out for this fundraiser.
“I looked at Madison’s statistics and there are 289,000 adults in the Madison area,” she says. “If each one of them donated $5, that will be $1.4 million that we could raise in one month. We realize that that is not going to happen, but we are also seeing people donating more than $5.
“We made it $5 because the thought is maybe someone has thought about how they enjoy the work that Urban Triage is doing and they really could appreciate making a donation, but maybe they don’t have a large amount of money. Some people think you have to donate a huge amount to make an impact with this concept. Many people donating $5 can make a big impact.”
