Emergency Philanthropy

Ultimately, we want to see children and their families recover more quickly from disasters and build resilience to cope with future shocks. We aim to act swiftly and mobilize funding from our clients and employees to support immediate relief as well as longer-term recovery and resilience.

We work with trusted partners that have an on-the-ground presence where the crisis occurs. We prioritize those partners with a strong track record of responding to emergencies and supporting local organizations. We also aim to provide flexible funding and remain as responsive as possible to on-the-ground needs.

As budgets allow, we also aim to provide unrestricted support to emergency relief–focused NGOs so that we contribute to strengthening the humanitarian ecosystem; support the development of monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) capacities and evidence-based decision making of implementing partners; and support forgotten crises that receive little media attention.

We align our emergency response focus to our routine programming core focus areas: health, education, child protection and climate action. This enables us to grant to our existing, trusted partners. It also helps ensure that we can both respond to the immediate crisis as well as the longer-term recovery and transition (back to) development. We are particularly focused on systems that affect children and families – like health, education and social protection – that can help in recovery and resilience.

Our grant portfolios are largely focused on strengthening local systems (health, education, child protection and climate action) precisely so that they are more effective every day and more resilient in the face of shocks. In working to strengthen systems today, our partners are developing strong, productive relationships with key government and NGO stakeholders and building deep knowledge of the local context that positions them to mount a swift response to any crisis.