After some questionable officiating during Sunday afternoon's overtime loss for the Buffalo Bills against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, fans started to donate money to Visually Impaired Advancement (VIA) in "honor" of the referees.
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Donations started Monday when one Bills fan in Massachusetts, Hunter Schinabeck, made a donation of $17 to VIA and shared a post of his charitable act.
"Hopefully, this donation is a small step in the greater fight of fighting blindness and getting those with visual impairment the help they need so something like this never happens again," Schinabeck said.
In a 24-hour span, more than 1,200 donations were made to VIA totaling more than $25,000. As of Thursday, VIA has received more than 1,700 donations totaling over $40,000 from all across the United States and around the globe.
"What started out as a light-hearted joke has turned into a great moment for the visually impaired community in Buffalo," said VIA's Senior Vice President Renee DiFlavio during a press conference on Thursday. "Most of our clients are not just Western New Yorkers, but also part of 'Bills Mafia' - me too - and were horrified by the call that led to the Bills' overtime loss. So while these donations may not help end bad call directly, they help our organization assist those impacted by vision loss."
DiFlavio says the donations made will go towards helping fund adaptive equipment, education, vision rehab, and job training and placement for people of all ages who are visually impaired.
"'Bills Mafia' and the 'City of Good Neighbors' has always been able to turn a negative into a positive.
Also in attendance for Thursday's press conference was Congressman Brian Higgins, who knows that these donations, despite being born out of some humor, will go a long way to raise funds to help not only VIA but the visually impaired of the community.
"What we learn from these kinds of programs and the people we run into is that even though they're visually impaired, they have great vision about what it is they want to do with their lives and how to get the skills necessary to be independent and self-sufficient," Higgins said.
For anyone looking to make a donation to VIA, you can click on the link here:
