We share five top five lessons from funding community-led organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Never in the history of GlobalGiving had there been a challenge that so definitively illuminated the power of our vast community as COVID-19.
The pandemic showed the strength of our deep-rooted networks for rapid and long-term crisis response and the progress that is possible when people come together for a common purpose.
Together, the GlobalGiving community raised an astounding $52 million over four years for COVID-19 relief, fueling the life-saving work of more than 2,264 organizations in more than 120 countries.
Centered first and foremost in the wisdom of local communities, ours has been a truly global response to a global challenge. Part of our response included the Coronavirus Relief Fund. With an expansive network of partners in nearly every country, local experience and insight proved invaluable in GlobalGiving’s proactive, monumental response.
Thanks to connections forged through our registered office in China and local intelligence from our Chinese partners, GlobalGiving launched the Coronavirus Relief Fund on January 27, 2020—nearly two months before the World Health Organization even declared a pandemic. The fund went on to raise more than $14 million from more than 26,000 donors, making it the second largest mobilization in GlobalGiving’s history (after our Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund).
Tragically, COVID-19 proved a formidable foe.
To date, the virus has claimed more than 7 million lives around the world. The most underserved communities, as in all crises, bore the brunt of the consequences, with Native and Black Americans three to four times more likely to be infected and hospitalized than white Americans. Alarming disparities also emerged in vaccine distribution, with people in high-income countries getting vaccinated 30 times faster than people in low-income countries.
We hope the world will not be tested again in the same way. But forecasters are already warning there’s a chance that a pandemic as deadly as COVID-19 could occur by 2033, and climate change and deforestation only increase the risk.
What will reduce the threat of another pandemic? Learning from the past.
“If lessons from the coronavirus pandemic are taken on board, the risk of another comparative pandemic can be reduced by as much as 71%,” writes the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska.
As GlobalGiving closes its monumental Coronavirus Relief Fund and awards our last available COVID-19 grants to partners around the world, we know their work to keep their communities safe goes on. We want to share it with you, along with our top lessons from the pandemic. We have learned:
Even before a pandemic was officially declared, our team was talking to partners on the ground in China. We were hearing about the extremity of the situation in Wuhan, even as the virus failed to make headlines in the mainstream news.
“Our partners in China took initiatives and jumped into action to respond to the community needs,” said GlobalGiving China Office Representative Rui Wang.
With an expansive network of partners in nearly every country, local experience and insight proved invaluable in GlobalGiving’s monumental response.
Thanks to local intelligence from Chinese partners like Non-Profit Incubator (NPI) and One Foundation, GlobalGiving launched the Coronavirus Relief Fund on January 27, 2020—nearly two months before the World Health Organization even declared a pandemic.
As the world began to catch onto the severity of the crisis, people started pulling together resources for ways to help. GlobalGiving’s Coronavirus Relief was often cited among the lists—pulling in donations small and large from everyday people living in countries around the world. Companies started to call, and GlobalGiving funneled their large donations into rapid, flexible, and no-strings-attached grants.
We trusted our partners to use the funds however they saw fit to meet the unique needs of their communities.
Before we knew it, the Coronavirus Relief Fund had raised more than $257,000 in just 90 days. Just one month later, the power of the crowd had kicked in, and the fund had raised more than $5 million for emergency efforts to stop the virus’ spread and protect communities. More than 300 organizations at the forefront of the response had grants in hand to act quickly to save lives and prevent further devastation.
That money meant people like Nathi struggling in the aftermath of losing her husband and the widespread business closures in India had one less thing to worry about. Nathi’s family was hand-delivered a sanitation and food kit by a worker with Seva Mandir. The locally-based nonprofit also created new programs to provide long-term livelihood support for women artisans through the pandemic with the help of the Coronavirus Relief Fund.
GlobalGiving’s swift response wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of local intelligence—which brings us to our next major lesson inspired by a women’s network in Chad on the importance of meeting inequities head-on through disaster grantmaking.
Over the past four years, countless nonprofits have told us that systemic inequalities and inadequacies in humanitarian aid are among the main barriers to helping their communities through the pandemic.
This pattern was on full display in Chad’s underfunded refugee camps during the pandemic. Thousands of refugees from Sudan’s Darfur region—where the ongoing and largely forgotten Darfur genocide is happening—came to Chad looking for safety from extreme violence. Instead, they were met with makeshift shelters in crowded camps that lacked sufficient access to food, water, hygiene items, healthcare, and community support due to significant funding shortages.
This nightmare situation was the backdrop that GlobalGiving’s partner Darfur Women Network (DWN) faced. “Our team was heartbroken because we couldn’t afford protective means for our beneficiaries,” said Mastora Bakhiet, Executive Director of DWN.
The tide eventually turned once they received a grant from the Coronavirus Relief Fund.
“With the intervention of GlobalGiving, providing a $5,000 grant, we were able
to supply COVID-19 preventive materials to refugee families. We also conducted 12 educational guidance lessons to raise awareness about COVID-19 and how to contain the virus.”
“These proactive measures helped ensure that no single person in the 7,000 families was affected by the virus,” Mastora said.
Reflecting on the lessons learned from the pandemic, Mastora pointed out that while highly-developed countries experienced similar uncertainty, fear, and loss—their strong healthcare systems and financial resources allowed for more effective recovery. In contrast, survivors in Chad’s refugee camps faced a much steeper uphill battle.
Mastora’s reflection underscores a vital lesson: addressing inequities is essential for ensuring that all communities are equipped to withstand and recover from crises.
The pandemic has brought these disparities into sharp focus, reaffirming the need for ongoing support and systemic change to build a more equitable and resilient future for all.
With the key insight that inequalities make us weaker as a whole, we now turn to a related lesson about the importance of protecting all community members for the wellbeing of the whole.
Remember those early days of the pandemic, back when everyone was scrubbing down their groceries? As research struggled to keep pace with the rapidly evolving crisis, COVID misinformation spread like wildfire. The Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN) saw how this was especially difficult on the immigrant communities they serve.
Even officials at one point told people the coronavirus travels via surfaces. It wasn’t until later that the discovery was made that the virus is airborne and not likely to enter the home on a box of pasta. To make rapidly-changing information even more confusing, most of the resources were not created with other cultures and languages in mind.
“To help with the lack of culturally-appropriate resources about the virus, we developed bilingual resources, including slide decks, a regularly updated blog, and podcasts in both Spanish and English for our clinician and immigrant communities,” said Amy Liebman, Chief Program Officer of MCN. “This approach ensured that both our communities received clear and consistent information.”
In reflecting on lessons learned from the pandemic, Amy highlighted the intersection of worker’s health and public health:
“We must advocate for the recognition of essential workers’ safety needs,” Amy said.
The organization’s advocacy emphasized that public health is intrinsically linked to worker health and safety, a stance that remains relevant as they look at other health issues like the H5N1 outbreak happening currently.
Their approach reinforces the need for people and organizations to advocate for the well-being of at-risk populations, especially when faced with institutional resistance.
Our next lesson learned is also a tale of the need to do more for communities.
The pandemic showed us the power of what is possible when big changes are enforced and normalized. For example, the child tax credit’s expansion during the pandemic cut child poverty nearly in half in America. Rwanda expanded its community-based health insurance program known as Mutuelle de Santé to cover more people and provide comprehensive health services at minimal costs to the individual.
Uruguay’s struggle with transitioning students to remote learning due to limited internet and technology access led to a nationwide program to provide students with internet access, improving digital literacy and bridging the digital divide for an entire generation.
In England, on March 26, 2020, the UK Government asked local authorities to “help make sure we get everyone in,” including those normally excluded from housing assistance under homelessness legislation.
Local authorities teamed up with local nonprofits like our partner St. Mungo’s to make this mammoth task into a reality for the first time.
St. Mungo’s managed the hotel stays for unhoused people and worked with volunteers to ensure new residents received essential services like food deliveries and in-person support at the hotels. As a member of the GlobalGiving’s Coronavirus Relief Fund, they received flexible funds to cover the costs.
“Many lives were saved because of Everyone In,” said Justyna Traczyk, Corporate Partnerships Executive with St. Mungo’s. “It connected people sleeping rough to the care, support, and treatment they desperately needed.”
“Everyone In has redefined what
can be achieved when there is a singular shared goal of saving lives,” Justyna said.
Justyna highlighted that the program was exceptionally successful because of the push to invest in getting people off the street—an approach not often taken because of the high upfront cost.
While programs of this scale are not common in non-crisis times—they have proven to be effective.
By January 2021, 11,263 people were in emergency accommodation and 26,167 people had moved on into settled accommodation (such as social housing or the private rental sector) or supported housing—showing how the program helped people stay sheltered for the long-term.
The success of these programs raises an important question: How do we keep the momentum going for big pushes like these without having the pressure of such dire disasters looming?
“People realized how important having a house is to keep you safe during the pandemic,” said Traczyk. “When they saw people who didn’t have that, they felt for that. Now our goal is to sustain that empathy moving forward.”
Despite the program’s success, the future of such programs remains uncertain. “The opposition argues that it’s too costly to provide accommodation for everyone. For this approach to become standard, it would require a complete overhaul of the system,” Traczyk said. “It means starting from scratch.”
As public understanding grows, their team urges people to push for systemic changes and ensure that this issue receives the attention it deserves.
The pandemic may be behind us, but these issues aren’t. We must sustain the programs that work.
Everyday people can help nonprofits keep the momentum going for effective programs born from the crisis of a pandemic. They can donate to meaningful causes like St. Mungo’s, get involved in local work, and participate in the civic process to push for the proven and effective pushes that our communities still desperately need.
Throughout the pandemic, our team was blown away by the creativity of our partners reimagining their entire structures to create inspiring new programs designed specifically for the needs of their communities in the pandemic.
Again and again, we thought back to one of our founding key values:
Great ideas can come from anywhere. And the best often come from the people who deeply understand the problem, the resources, and the path necessary for a better tomorrow.
Ideas like the one from Mobile Mini Circus for Children—who transformed their entire organization from a circus program for Afghani kids into a full-fledged COVID-19 response. They created social distancing circles and face shields out of old circus props and rapidly deployed them throughout the city. Their innovative “social circus” also educated the public on coronavirus safety and brought joy and humor to lighten tense times.
“The beauty of GlobalGiving is that we don’t provide answers for communities—we give them the resources so they can enact their own,” said Victoria Vrana, GlobalGiving CEO.
Another thing about GlobalGiving that we are proud of is our ability to adapt to the urgent and ever-evolving needs of the community we serve—our nonprofit partners. Shortly after launching the Coronavirus Relief Fund, GlobalGiving created the COVID-19 Hardship Microgrants Initiative. The program initially offered 100 microgrants of $1,000 each, but was widely expanded by the end of the pandemic.
The model quickly became popular in the sector, with foundations and companies creating their own microgrant initiatives. GlobalGiving supported many corporate giving programs—including the Spanx foundation’s Red Backpack Fund, which granted $5,000 grants to 1,000 female entrepreneurs to keep their businesses afloat during the pandemic.
Beyond addressing immediate challenges, these funds enabled the creation of innovative programs and strategies that nonprofits are trying to carry forth into their future—but still need your help.
GlobalGiving is now concluding our Coronavirus Relief Fund, as the pandemic declaration has ended, along with widespread disruptions in daily life. Yet, the work of our local partners to protect their communities lives on.
We hope you’ll join us in celebrating the impact of this one-of-a-kind fund, which moved money to local solutions typically overlooked in disaster grantmaking. The hundreds of grassroots organizations that formed the backbone of the Coronavirus Relief Fund received flexible funding from donors and companies without strings attached—a feat that everyone who was part of the fund should take pride in!
We extend our deepest thanks for the collaborative effort that made the fund’s impact so significant. Your remarkable generosity meant that millions of real people got support to weather the virus and emerge more prepared for the future because of it.
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