Star Trek stars pitch in to raise money for COVID-19 relief
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Some current and former Star Trek stars are getting involved in the effort to assist communities that have been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. An article from TrekMovie.com helpfully gathered together a selection of the stars’ efforts, some of which are still ongoing.
Last week, Sir Patrick Stewart participated in a COVID-19 charity auction from Sotheby’s with the International Rescue Committee. In the auction, Stewart offered a virtual Shakespearean class to help one “learn more about how to communicate, speak and interpret scenes in order to make them real, current and spontaneous.” Other participants in the MayDay COVID-19 Charity Auction included Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, The Strokes, Sting, and Sasha Baron Cohen.
Stewart’s Picard co-star, Alison Pill (no relation), also lent her talents to the fight against coronavirus. With the closure of schools across the nation, many children from struggling families have lost access to the school meals they depend on, so charitable organization No Kid Hungry is partnering with The Homebound Theater Project of New York to present a series of online performances featuring Pill and other Hollywood and Broadway stars. While Pill’s performance has already come and gone, tickets are still available for other streaming shows running into June and all proceeds will go to feed children in need. That’s at homeboundtheater.org.
For those local to Southern California, Enterprise and NCIS star Scott Bakula took to Twitter recently to ask for fans’ contributions to the Mayor’s Fund of Los Angeles, which provides support to L.A. families who are being left out of other assistance programs. And his Enterprise co-star John Billingsley is raising awareness for the Hollywood Food Coalition by holding a Twitter contest with a grand prize of dinner with himself and his wife at landmark Hollywood restaurant Musso and Frank Grill. Contest entrants must follow the Hollywood Food Coalition on Twitter and reply before June 1st with a way that they’ve recently helped their community.
Other Trek actors who are supporting charities include TNG and Picard star Jonathan Frakes, who helped video-sharing website Cameo raise over $725,000 for COVID-19 relief; Deep Space Nine actors Chase Masterson and Nicole de Boer, who took part in HoloCon, a two-day virtual convention organized by The Lambda Quadrant to support the Sage organization for LGBT elders; and Discovery and The Office star Rainn Wilson who offered to match donations to his charity Lide Haiti on the recent May 5th Giving Tuesday.
If you’re interested in making a charitable contribution to help in the fight against COVID-19, then make sure you do so safely. The FTC has issued guidance on how consumers can avoid coronavirus-related scams, which you can read more about on the FTC’s website.
