The Fyre Festival in the Bahamas promised A-list models like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid and music from the likes of Migos and Blink-182. Instead, guests who spent upwards of $12,000 hoping to cavort with Instagram models on a “private island” in the Bahamas ended up in bare-bones tents with cheese sandwiches near a Sandals resort.
It was so bad that rapper Ja Rule, who was one of the festival’s organizers along with entrepreneur Billy McFarland, took to Twitter saying he was “heartbroken” by the turn of events and pledged to give full refunds to make everything right. Naturally, the internet had plenty of fun enjoying the schadenfreude of people with $12,000 to burn on a party slumming it in decrepit tents and scrounging for substandard cuisine.
But instead of traveling to the luxury beach music festival that wasn’t to be, attendees could have put that $12,000 toward people actually in need, not just marks victimized by a slick ad campaign and sexy Instagram photos. Here are a few ways $12,000 can make the world a better place:
- 1 water well in Africa that serves 350 people on average through The Water Project
- 8 new 13″ Apple MacBook Pro laptops for students around the world in need of a reliable computer to stay on top of increasingly internet-based work.
- 3,600 mosquito nets for people living in areas affected by malaria through UN-supported Nothing But Nets
- 12,000 trees planted in Haiti as part of a program from Retree.
- Food for a day for 24,000 children, based on data from the UN’s World Food Programme