# The Case for a Charity - Clapping For Future
Long time no see - I've been kind of busy. I do have something to show for though. A friend of mine came up with the idea to found a charity. Sounds crazy? Maybe. I absolutely love it though - when he asked me to join, I instantly went for it. Clapping For Future is the name of it. The idea is to support nursing trainees financially and to encourage new ones to start (by increasing their pay). Nurses are chronically underpaid, and there simply much too few of them in our medical system. This obviously goes perfectly with the current times - Covid-19 and the shortage of nurses:
- Germany is losing nurses all across the board.
- The plans for the so called Pflegebonus (Corona bonus for nurses) are also delayed.
- Due to Covid-19, especially right now with Omicron looming, there is an extreme shortage of nursing staff.
Together with my friend, we have devised a solution:
This is still work in progress, and likely things like the photo or other elements of the website that I haven't shown yet will change a lot. Still, the idea is clear: We will be collecting donations throughout 2022 to boost the pay of the roughly 50.000 nursing trainees.
From a technical perspective, the challenge of setting up your own donation page instead of using something like betterplace, donorbox, or simply gofundme, is remarkably small. We use SQLite3 and Flask, and generating donation receipts for taxes (Spendenbelege / Spendenquittungen) is extremely easy using the reportlab Python package.
The huge advantage is having 100% control over your own brand and 100% agility in terms of how everything should look like. We are quite serious with this and have founded an entrepreneurial company (Clapping for Future gemeinnützige UG), which is an early stage GmbH. Let's see where this goes.