Cure Autism Now | MAKING THE INTERNET WORK FOR CHARITIES | Dec. 5, 1998 #AutisticHistory

[Note: Shared for #AutisticHistory archive purposes. This is NOT An Autistic Ally.]

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MAKING THE INTERNET WORK FOR CHARITIES

Web Site Directs Percentage of Sales to Good Causes

   If anybody knows where the money is hidden on the Internet, it’s a Stanford MBA. 
    M-B-A. Make Bucks Aggressively. Scott Dunlap had been through the program. 

“I showed up there to learn how to make money,” says Dunlap. “I quickly figured out anybody can make money, but not everybody has a chance to change the world.” 

He learned that through a school charity contest in which he built a Web site linked to Amazon.com. When students bought books from Amazon through his site, Amazon paid a cut to Dunlap. Dunlap donated the cut to the Special Olympics. 

He sent e-mail alerting business students to his site. It was a modest effort that raised more than $500, he says. But Dunlap left the site up when the competition ended. 

“The sales kept coming,” says Dunlap, 29. “We found over half the traffic was coming from outside of Stanford.” 

E-mail spread the word. Soon, visitors were purchasing CDs and books on tape. 

Dunlap graduated in June and went to work for a Palo Alto software start-up. He kept thinking about the charity site. Why not expand the idea? More retailers paying a percentage. More charities sharing the bounty. 

The notion became a buzz in Stanford circles. 
 

“It turned out to be a great cocktail party story,” Dunlap says. 

A lawyer volunteered, and a public relations person, and a half-dozen engineers.
  

They launched the http://www.4charity .com site in September and are now working through a tangle of state and federal rules governing non-profit charities. Still, shoppers already are using the site in small numbers. 
     

Dunlap has added retailers selling toys, cigars, music, videos, golf equipment, clothes. They typically contribute 5 percent of the sale, though that varies. (The price is the same as using their sites directly.) He’s added big-name charities — such as the Red Cross — and some small ones — Kapi’olani Health Foundation in Hawaii and Cure Autism Now of Los Angeles. 
     

Retailers haven’t made their first payments to Dunlap yet. He expects the money will be modest at first. But he’s not a Stanford MBA for nothing. Online shopping is taking off. Experts say U.S. consumers will spend $2.3 billion online this year — double last year’s figure. Even those without an MBA know the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is money time in the retail business. 
    

“The timing couldn’t be better,” Dunlap says. 

He hopes his site will be a model. He sees a time when competition will force every e-commerce site to add a charitable component, which would make his site obsolete. 
     

“If, two years out, everybody has some sort of charitable feature on their site,” he says, “then we’ve accomplished what we’re hoping to.” 

     And so he hopes to go out of business. Not exactly what they teach at Stanford.

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Note/Warning:

Autistic people have fought the inclusion of ABA in therapy for us since before Autism Speaks, and other non-Autistic-led autism organizations, started lobbying legislation to get it covered by insurances and Medicaid. 

ABA is a myth originally sold to parents that it would keep their Autistic child out of an institution. Today, parents are told that with early intervention therapy their child will either be less Autistic or no longer Autistic by elementary school, and can be mainstreamed in typical education classes. ABA is very expensive to pay out of pocket. Essentially, Autism Speaks has justified the big price tag up front will offset the overall burden on resources for an Autistic’s lifetime. The recommendation for this therapy is 40 hours a week for children and toddlers.

The original study that showed the success rate of ABA to be at 50% has never been replicated. In fact, the study of ABA by United States Department of Defense was denounced as a failure. Not just once, but multiple times. Simply stated: ABA doesn’t work. In study after repeated study: ABA (conversion therapy) doesn’t work. 

What more recent studies do show: Autistics who experienced ABA therapy are at high risk to develop PTSD and other lifelong trauma-related conditions. Historically, the autism organizations promoting ABA as a cure or solution have silenced Autistic advocates’ opposition. ABA is also known as gay conversion therapy.

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[Note: Autism is NOT a disease, but a neurodevelopmental difference and disability.]

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Fact: Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism.

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