Most sports team owners don’t really care about giving back. Although they’re already billionaires, all they really care about is how they can become even bigger billionaires. So when an owner does something generous, like donate millions of dollars to a good cause, he/she deserves to be recognized for the good deed.
Paul Allen, who owns the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, deserves a lot of praise for a recent contribution he made.
When everyone else is panicking over Ebola, Allen decided to donate $100 million to the fight against the virus.
"We're faced with a huge challenge with Ebola," Allen told ESPN. "If you have one of these epidemics with the number of cases potentially doubling every 20 days, to get ahead of that and contain it, you have to send large numbers of health workers over to the affected areas, and get them in place and get communications going with communities. If the health workers get ill, they want to know they can get medevaced out of there. So we've been trying to do a few things, to build containers that can go on planes to help with the health workers evacuated.
"I'm just trying to help show the way that we need to really increase what we're doing now, because we're currently chasing the expansion of the disease, and we've got to get ahead of expansion."
To be fair, it’s worth noting that Allen has more money than some NBA owners. After all, he’s the co-founder of Microsoft and was considered to be the 55th richest man in the world, as of August 2014.
Still, it’s nice to see someone put their money to good use instead of just sitting on it while watching more and more money flows in.
Allen says he’s working with the World Health Organization to increase its capacity for handling the logistics of transporting international aid workers. In addition, he’s creating a fund to help cover the costs of emergency transportation of workers.
Some of the money will go to the University of Massachusetts Medical School to help provide decontamination and lab equipment to Liberian hospitals. The money will also be used to help educate the people of Liberia on the Ebola virus.
"I think we've now seen that even something that's happening in West Africa, how it can arrive on our doorsteps very quickly," Allen said. "We're all interconnected in today's world."
Final Thoughts
Big picture: $100 million to Allen is like $20 to the average American. But that doesn’t mean he deserves any less praise for his generous donation. Let’s face it: every NBA owner is rich. It wouldn’t hurt any of them to donate some money to good causes and great charities around the world.
Unfortunately, as stated previously, a lot of rich people aren’t concerned with using their money for good causes. All they’re mostly concerned about is how to use their money to get even more money.
As they say, good things happen to good people. Now that Allen has won a Super Bowl as the owner of the Seattle Seahawks, maybe he’ll bring home a championship for the fans of the Portland Trail Blazers. The team isn’t taken seriously as a championship contender for the 2014-15 season, but that could chance very quickly.
Damian Lillard and LaMarcus Aldridge combine to make one of the best duos in the NBA, and they had a lot of success during the 2013-14 season. Portland made it past the James Harden and Dwight Howard in the first round of the playoffs. Although they lost to the eventual champion San Antonio Spurs in the semifinals, it was a great learning experience for the team.
It’s clear that Allen is a great owner, and a great person. Don’t be surprised if he turns the Trail Blazers into a championship team sooner, rather than later.
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