Alix Guerrier

COVID-19 recovery should prioritize our social safety net for greatest impact

A decade ago, an unimaginable human catastrophe unfolded in Haiti, as a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and devastated the Caribbean island. Waves of international relief followed, including about $15 billion in recovery and reconstruction support.

As a Haitian American with connections to family who still lived there, I began to hear about a massive disconnect between aid flowing in to Haiti and the results reported from the ground.

The glaring mistake: allocating less than 2% of funds to organizations that directly support the most vulnerable.

Now, amid our spiraling human catastrophe caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, trillions of dollars are flowing—from the initial CARES Act and its recent expansion—and trillions more will be needed to fix the public health and economic crisis. But in the rush to address this unfolding disaster, the United States risks making a classic mistake with which those of us in the philanthropic sector are all too familiar: the money isn’t reaching the nonprofits best positioned to help.

Too often, staggeringly huge outlays never get to the local organizations, such as food banks and homeless shelters, that can help communities and families most in need. The implosion of the U.S. economy under widespread quarantine and stay-at-home orders is exponentially different from what happens after hurricanes and earthquakes and wildfires. Even so, clear lessons from prior efforts of humanitarian relief must be applied to the next iterations of federal funding if the help most needed is to make a difference. If members of Congress want to see the greatest impact and relief in their districts, they must realign their priorities.

A scan of the CARES Act itself is instructive. A little over one percent of its funding was allocated to social safety net programs , which include those administered by local nonprofits and community organizations. That’s just $26 billion of the CARES Act’s $2.2 trillion. Even within that category, far too little went to local organizations such as food banks ($450 million) that are already stretched and will continue to see even greater need. Indeed, in the months ahead, the long lines of cars we’ve seen waiting their turn at food banks will likely grow even longer.

This is all too consistent with the humanitarian aid that flows after disasters like the earthquake in Haiti. According to 2017 data from Development Initiatives , an international development organization, just 0.3% of humanitarian assistance goes to non-governmental organizations. This fits the pattern of mistakes that follow humanitarian disasters around the world. Over and over again, money fails to flow to the small nonprofits, NGOs and community organizations that can be trusted to target assistance where it is needed most. While all of us in the philanthropic sector know well that following a disaster, individual donors are incredibly generous, the sheer scale of funds needed for recovery from catastrophes can only be met by governments.

According to 2017 data from Development Initiatives , an international development organization, just 0.3% of humanitarian assistance goes to non-governmental organizations. We’re seeing in real time how the federal and state government interventions are working, or not, across the country. As someone who has family ties to the Caribbean community in New York City, now the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m tracking the kind of help that’s needed there. If future iterations of the CARES Act follow the formula of what was signed into law on March 27, we will be neglecting the on-the-ground lifesavers who are crucial to a community’s response and recovery. In addition, the American taxpayer will be getting less of a return on our collective investment.

In recent weeks, GlobalGiving has offered microgrants of $1,000 each to 100 community-led nonprofits around the world. We’ve counted on a wave of kindness from individual donors to fund these and other efforts and are better than halfway through a goal of raising $5 million dollars for our Coronavirus Relief Fund. But even with corporate partners and generous major donors stepping up to help, the gap between what’s needed and what’s provided by philanthropic giving is too great. Small nonprofits—the kind of organizations feeding people who, through no fault of their own, just lost their jobs—must be included in federal efforts to address what the IMF predicts will be the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

The current crisis has a dual nature. On the one hand, it ties us together through our shared biological vulnerability. No one is immune; all of us are at risk. On the other hand, the impact varies widely, depending on factors like income, profession, geography—and even government action or inaction. Local organizations that form the backbone of our social safety net are best positioned to respond where need is greatest. They need more than a fraction of a percent of the global humanitarian response to mitigate the suffering they see every day.

Unless the federal response begins to allocate more to the nonprofit sector in the United States, we will be making the same mistake in dealing with the devastation of COVID-19 as is repeatedly made when an earthquake flattens a country.

Alix Guerrier

Washington, District of Columbia, United States 5K followers 500+ connections

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Education

Stanford Graduate School of Business

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Washington, District of Columbia, United States
5K followers 500+ connections