Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York creator and photojournalist, is the brains behind his Humans of New York Facebook. He has swept social media, coming in with 14.6 million Facebook followers, 3.7 Instagram million followers and nearly 334,000 Twitter followers. Stanton also wrote the book "Humans of New York," which was on the New York Times best seller list for 28 weeks!
On each of his pages, Stanton takes photos of interesting and inspiring people he finds while out and about in New York City. He then writes a quote or story told by the person he photographed.
Stanton doesn't always stay in New York. Recently he has traveled to Pakistan. Other than just sharing his beautiful pictures with his followers, he taking his platform and changing the lives of many people.
This post by Stanton received tons of attention after it went online. Tons of people wanted to help this woman out and due to this he posted a follow up with this:
The day after this post he began to post about the Pakistan brick kilns. In Pakistan over 20,000 brick kilns operate due to millions of workers. He then brings up a very serious issue called bonded labor.
"Throughout rural Pakistan, illiterate and desperate laborers are tricked into accepting small loans in exchange for agreeing to work at brick kilns for a small period of time. But due to predatory terms, their debt balloons, growing larger as time goes on, with no possibility of repayment, until these laborers are condemned to work for the rest of their lives for no compensation. If the laborer dies, the debt is passed on to his or her children. The practice is illegal, but due to the extreme power and wealth of brick kiln owners, the law is often unenforced in rural areas. It is estimated that well over one million men, women and children are trapped in this modern feudalist system."
The day after he posted this on Facebook, he created a follow up post:
"Yesterday 40,000 people donated over $1,000,000 in fewer than 12 hours to help Fatima end bonded labor. The fundraiser currently sits at almost $1,400,000. There were no perks offered. No ‘reward levels.’ This was motivated by nothing more than genuine compassion and a desire to empower a woman who’s devoted her life to freeing people trapped in modern slavery."
By the end of 72 hours there was around $2 million raised for this cause.
To see more about the cause and the rest of Stanton's posts they are all on the Humans of New York Facebook page.
I think it is absolutely beautiful to see people come together through the power of the Internet to bring change to those less fortunate.
