On Tuesday, The Game took to Instagram to announce that he was donating $500,000 to Flint, Michigan, making his the largest celebrity donation to the crisis and bringing him into the public eye.
The Instagram post showed the rapper’s charity, The Robin Hood Project, wiring the money to Avita, a water company. Avita, for its part, pledged to match The Game’s donation, bringing the total sent to Flint up to $1 million.
A photo posted by The Game (@losangelesconfidential) on
The Game explained why he felt the need to act when he learned about the situation in Flint, where the city is in crisis as the drinking water is contaminated with led. In his post, The Game said his younger sister and her children live in Flint, and that he cares.
Thousands of kids have been exposed to lead poisoning, which can damage their developmental growth, and the adults in the town are not fairing much better. A state of emergency was declared in the city over the state of the water.
“It’s obviously a very big deal and a tragedy in Flint, and I saw people donating small amounts, and I just thought I’d go above and beyond that,” The Game, reports the Daily Beast. “So I donated the funds from the first 11 shows of my European tour. Avita matched it and they’ll be one million bottles of water given out — 33,000 bottles of water at a time because of trucking and shipping it in and out. It’s not easy shipping it out because of the snowstorms, and trucks being backed up. But we’ll get it there, however long it takes.”