The Cause That Paul Walker Remained Dedicated to Until the Moment of His Death

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreportfolio/3369495546">andre almeida</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Paul Walker, best known for starring in the popular Fast and Furious franchise, died Saturday in a car accident in Valencia, California. He was 40.

It would be difficult to make the case that Walker was a particularly influential or exceptional actor. But he was a fine action star and was decent in his heavier dramatic fare. But beyond his on-screen credentials, all available evidence suggests that Walker was, up until the moment he died, a celebrity who genuinely cared about the world around him—someone who used his celebrity for worthy causes.

According to a statement posted to the actor’s Facebook fan page, Walker died “in a tragic car accident while attending a charity event for his organization Reach Out Worldwide.”

Reach Out Worldwide, formed by Walker in 2010, is a 501(c)(3) that provides rescue and recovery aid in the wake of major natural disasters. The group supplements rescue efforts with its own team of paramedics, doctors, and search-and-rescue professionals. Reach Out Worldwide has lent its services to disaster-relief efforts in the Philippines, Alabama, Indonesia, Chile, and Haiti. “I’d made a few runs into Port-au-Prince and was negotiating with the army to give me baby formula, tents, extension cords,” Walker told the Daily Telegraph, an Australian tabloid newspaper, in 2011. “I was hustling for everything.”

Here’s his explanation for why he started Reach Out Worldwide:

Because of my travels with work and pleasure, a lot of the times disasters would strike in areas that I’d been. You think of the faces—they might not be people you’re in contact with but you can’t help but wonder how that family was you had dinner with. That stuff starts crossing your mind and you feel so helpless. I would be consumed with anger, like, “Fuck! I wanna be there, I wanna do whatever I can.” One of my best friends had heard it too many times and ultimately he just held me accountable. He punked me out: “So you gonna pack your bags and go to Haiti and help out or what?”

“When the shit hits the fan,” Walker continued, “that’s when you actually see the best in people.”

Hours, one of the last films Walker starred in, is scheduled for a mid-December release. It’s a fitting send-off for Walker: The film is set in a hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, with Walker playing a father desperately trying to protect his newborn daughter.

Here’s a clip of Walker and the Fast & Furious 7 cast encouraging fans to help victims of Typhoon Haiyan:

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate