I’m starting this fundraiser for Clean Yangon, a grassroots Myanmar group that has been feeding orphaned children and displaced families in the middle of the country’s civil war for years.

Clean Yangon began in 2017 as a simple volunteer effort to clean Yangon’s streets and teach people better waste habits. After the 2021 military coup and the fighting that followed, the same young volunteers shifted their work to the front lines of the conflict. They now operate mainly in Karenni (Kayah) State and other hard-hit areas, living among the people they serve.

Their daily work is straightforward and hard:

1. Cooking and handing out rice, noodles, eggs, and hot meals to children and families in IDP camps
2. Running free mobile clinics for the sick and injured
3. Giving school supplies and simple classrooms so kids don’t lose every chance at education
4. Sitting with traumatized children, telling stories, playing, and trying to give them some sense of normal
5. Helping build basic shelters and latrines when people have nothing

They receive almost no support from big international organizations. Everything runs on small donations from ordinary people and the determination of local volunteers who keep showing up even when roads are dangerous, prices keep rising, and aid is scarce.

Right now the need is urgent. Food stocks in many camps are running low. Children are going hungry. Families who fled airstrikes and artillery have no income and nowhere else to turn. A plate of rice and a cup of clean water is the difference between a child lasting another day or not.

Every dollar you give goes straight into food, water, basic medicine, and the hands of the volunteers who deliver it. No overhead offices in foreign capitals. No big salaries. Just people who live in the same conditions as the families they help, cooking large pots of food over open fires and walking camp paths to make sure the kids eat.

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when ordinary people refuse to look away while a country burns, this is it. Clean Yangon has already fed tens of thousands of displaced people. With your help they can keep going.

Please give what you can. A single meal costs very little here. A consistent supply of rice and water can keep an entire camp of children from starving.

Thank you for standing with them.