One of the victims of the Chapel Hill shootings in North Carolina was 23-year-old Deah Shaddy Barakat (below, left):

Baraket, a dental student whose family came from Syria, planned to visit Turkey this summer to provide aid to refugees in a program sponsored by the Syrian American Medical Society Foundation. He called his own fundraiser for the trip “Project Refugee Smiles.” You can see Barakat promote the project in the video below:

As a way to show support for the victims and coalesce atheist generosity in the wake of the attacks, Foundation Beyond Belief set up a donation page with all proceeds benefitting SAMS. While that fundraiser will close down in the next day or two, I’m thrilled to tell you that it has raised over $20,000. (You can see the current tally on the donation page.)

That’s an incredible amount of money that will go a long way to fulfilling Barakat’s personal mission. $20,000 was the amount he was hoping to raise in the first place, though the outpouring of support from around the world over the past week has led to donations of more than $444,000 made on his page.

(Large portions of this article were published earlier)



