The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: A Messy Dare That Funded a Breakthrough

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In the summer of 2014, for about eight weeks, it seemed everyone with a phone was dumping ice water on their head. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is remembered as a tidy charity triumph, but it began as something else. Versions of a cold water challenge had circulated since 1991 in the northern United States and northern Norway, with no link to any disease. That May, a New Jersey fire department that staged it with fire hoses was disciplined for using township equipment without permission.

This episode traces the precise chain of people that tied the stunt to ALS, from golfer Chris Kennedy to Pat Quinn in Yonkers to former baseball player Pete Frates and his Boston sports network. It weighs the psychology of the 24 hour deadline and the public tagging, the 220 million dollars raised worldwide, and the criticism that came with it: wasted water in a drought, slacktivism, stem cell and animal testing objections, and the charge of funding cannibalism.

• Chris Kennedy nominated his cousin Jeanette Senerchia of Pelham, New York, whose husband Anthony had lived with ALS for 11 years, the first documented link between the stunt and the disease.
• The rules gave nominees 24 hours to douse themselves and donate 10 dollars or skip the ice and give 100, and 2.4 million videos were shared on Facebook between June 1 and mid-August.
• The ALS Association took in more than 100 million dollars in weeks, against 19.4 million the previous year, and money sent to Project MinE helped identify the NEK1 gene by July 2016.
• William MacAskill argued the craze diverted giving from other causes and encouraged moral licensing, while a UK survey found only 10 percent of participants actually donated.
• The official 2015 relaunch raised about 1 million dollars in the U.S., yet the format returned in April 2025 when a University of South Carolina club raised nearly 440,000 dollars for Active Minds.