GlobalGiving Forward Fund

The GlobalGiving community was challenged like never before in 2022. We saw war, famine, floods, and financial and political strife put pressure on people around the globe.

But we also saw our community show up like never before. Thank you. 

Two weeks before Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine, our partners’ requests for support prompted us to launch the GlobalGiving Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund. Within eight days of the Feb. 24 invasion, we sent the first emergency grants to nonprofit organizations whose home cities became the front lines of the conflict.

From Kyiv to Kherson, these organizations stood by their communities. And from Albania to Zambia, nearly 200,000 people like you rallied and gave more than $66.7 million to support them.

But the needs presented by war and other calamities persisted—and they extended far beyond Ukraine’s borders.

In the Horn of Africa, more than 20 million people faced the worst famine conditions in decades. HODI brought resources to people who were suffering from the drought and struggling to get ample supplies of food and water for their households.

In Pakistan, with one-third of the country submerged in floodwaters, Al-Mustafa Welfare Society fed and assisted families who lost homes, crops, livestock—nearly everything—in the floods.

And when hurricanes threatened entire islands and knocked out power grids, the leaders in their communities were there to relieve, rebuild, and restore.

For Ariadna Godreau, director of our longtime partner Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico, Hurricane Fiona was a lecture on the status of the recovery from Hurricane Maria in 2017.

The impacts, especially on low-income, Black communities and single moms still waiting on 2017-era assistance, underscored the need for equitable access to recovery funds, housing, and policies to ensure climate justice.

“Despite the enormous challenges and the hills we have to climb, I feel hopeful that we’re starting to make real changes and can make more as we continue to work together,” Ariadna told us.

As the climate crisis makes compounding disasters the new reality, the community partners in our network keep working to prepare and respond. They have the courage, knowledge, and commitment. Our role is to trust in their expertise—and invest in it.

That’s the foundation of our mission: to fuel community-led change. And in 2022, we pursued more opportunities to share power, co-create solutions, and live up to all of our community-led commitments. None of our urgent work would be possible without your unwavering support.

Learn more about how you helped fuel community-led change in a reflection on 2022 and a preview of our collective impact yet to come.

With gratitude for your partnership,

Donna Callejon
Executive Advisor + 2022 Interim GlobalGiving CEO

Victoria Vrana
GlobalGiving CEO

Links:

• Read GlobalGiving's 2022 Annual Report

Thank you for your generous donation to the GlobalGiving Forward Fund. Donations to this fund are making a difference, helping to ensure communities around the world are in the driver's seat of change.

As we celebrate GlobalGiving’s 20th anniversary and the power of community-led change this year, we want to shine the spotlight again on three community-led nonprofits and introduce the leaders behind them. Their stories, first shared at GlobalGiving’s virtual anniversary event in March, are now available to view as part of our “Community Foward Film Series.” 

Here is a short description of some of their critical work: 

• Hope Foundation for African Women is working to end the life-threatening practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Kenya, starting from within the communities where it happens. The organization’s founder, Grace B. Mose Okong’o, endured FGM as a girl, and the painful experience haunted her. Grace’s work with Hope Foundation for African Women is inspired by her belief that FGM survivors and perpetrators, sometimes one and the same, hold the key to ending FGM and breaking gender barriers once and for all.
  
  
• La Maraña is making space for Puerto Ricans to envision and execute solutions that rebuild and improve their island. La Maraña’s Executive Director, Carlo André Oliveras Rodriguez, witnessed firsthand the devastation in Puerto Rico after hurricanes Irma and Maria—and the painfully slow government response that left lights out in some communities for months. Carlo believes Puerto Ricans themselves know best how to create safer futures, but they’re shut out through broken systems.
  
  
• Seeding Sovereignty is a multi-lens collective that works to radicalize and disrupt colonized spaces through land, body, and food sovereignty work, community building, and cultural preservation. Their Co-Executive Director, S.A. Lawrence-Welch, is bringing Indigenous and marginalized people together in healing ways and spaces through Seeding Sovereignty. The legacy of ethnic persecution and trauma that S.A. and their family faced, including residential boarding schools and the Sixties Scoop Era, fuels their determination to lead by example and bring support, validation, and joy to others in their journey through the healing process in a colonized world.

Watch and share our #CommunityForward film series to learn more and help us spread the word about the power of community-led change.

Your support of the GlobalGiving Forward Fund powers community-led responses, and it means people like Grace, Carlo, and S.A. get the critical resources they need to help their community move forward and build a better future. 

With gratitude,

Donna Callejon
Interim GlobalGiving CEO

2021 was a year of highs and lows. It was a year that required collective action—and reflection.

Just as new vaccines gave us hope, new coronavirus variants took it away, stretching one of the worst pandemics in history into a second deadly year. Globally, a mere 3% of people in low-income countries were vaccinated with at least one dose, compared to 65% of people in rich countries.

With broken social systems exposed in stark ways, you stood up for a better world, a more equitable world.

Thanks to you, the GlobalGiving community raised $95 million for people in need, even as “crisis” became a keyword.

The climate crisis caused more powerful storms, pushed a tornado farther across the United States than any other in nearly a century, and prompted a famine in Madagascar. Crisis also described deadly conflicts for migrants at international borders and told the story of many Afghans forced to flee after the Taliban retook control of the country.

But the heart of the GlobalGiving community spread hope in the most challenging of times.

Enayat and Gene, Joyce, and David kept their commitment to supporting girls’ education in Afghanistan.

Isadora helped families rebuild foundations that powerful earthquakes in Mexico destroyed.

Kenita stopped at nothing to pursue her education and now provides resources other single parents need to learn and thrive.

And Donaldo advocated for Indigenous communities to grow their own food while guarding their seeds and heritage.

Along with thousands of others, they made the world a better place in 2021. You fueled their life-changing missions.

In service of these changemakers, the GlobalGiving team looked inward. In what ways did we need to serve them better? As we approach our 20th anniversary, we have the impetus to look back. Rigorous introspection has strengthened, not wavered, our founding purpose. To transform the world, we must become ever more community led—beginning with ourselves.

We know that we need to work from the inside out and always put local leaders front and center. Because change happens in community centers in Brazil and classrooms in Haiti. It happens in gardens in Indonesia and hectares of the Peruvian rainforest.

Focusing on how and where community-led change happens prompted changes inside GlobalGiving in 2021. We found that our nonprofit onboarding process, the Accelerator, brought thousands of incredible organizations into our community but limited countless others. So we decided to find a better way.

We’re starting small and with ourselves, but our aim is big and boundless: We want to transform aid and philanthropy to accelerate community-led change. That means when you share, we’ll listen. Show us what you care about, and we’ll champion your cause. Set your goals and tell us how we can best help you meet them.

Only when communities are in the driver’s seat of change will we be able to solve the world’s most entrenched problems—racism, poverty, inequality—and unleash brighter futures for everyone, regardless of the place they call home.

So this year and the next 20 that follow, lead us to the change you want to see.

With gratitude for your partnership,

Donna Callejon
Interim GlobalGiving CEO

Links:

• Read GlobalGiving's 2021 Annual Report

In some ways, 2020 devastated us; in others, it galvanized us.

Although GlobalGiving helped students from Nairobi, Kenya to Connecticut, U.S.A. continue learning, fueled local responses to natural disasters worldwide, and fostered climate action through projects that planted mangroves and harnessed solar power, the pandemic was the most all-encompassing challenge we faced.

COVID-19 has impacted all of us. Personally. Professionally. Profoundly. In early April, the news that my uncle and godfather died from COVID-19 shattered my family. That was, unfortunately, only the first of a series of losses in my extended family. I was struck by how many people around the world were facing similar loss and grief, and especially how many were doing so at the same time that job losses and lack of childcare took away basic assumptions about how we lead our lives.

At GlobalGiving, we committed to adapting the way we meet our mission.

We couldn’t allow anything to impede community-led change—not even a virus that has changed the world.

As we tried to adjust to a new reality and the pandemic’s compounding effects on communities everywhere, the sweeping racial justice protests made us rise up and reassess. We wanted to rally behind our partners and take a stand. But we also realized that we have work to do. We dove into that work for the remainder of the year. Preparing to audit all of our programs for implicit bias, prioritizing the visibility of our partners engaged in racial justice work in the United States and internationally, and identifying, naming, and addressing how philanthropy broadly (including ourselves) plays a role in structural racism was a start. That led us to create a new racial justice cause for support on our website, curate more content that amplifies the true voices of our partners who are rooted in this space, and commit to promoting equity across our organization and in the world.

But it’s not a task that we can simply check off a to-do list. “Our commitments are not enough to undo systems created and reinforced over hundreds of years to oppress Black people in the United States. It will take all of us, working hard every day, to create a future free from racial injustice,” GlobalGiving Director of Programs Michael Gale wrote. That work is only part of our contribution and part of our continual process of learning and growing.

We kept learning and growing as Election Day neared in the U.S., and we wondered how we could offer more support and stability to our community. Meanwhile, many of our partners around the world were responding to floods and famines, helping workers survive the blow of lost wages, and serving people in their communities through the upheaval.

Distance, divisions, and disasters defined 2020. They threatened our ties and tested our solutions. Luckily, we’re tightly knit—and dogged.

And, thankfully, we were strengthened by a level of generosity we’ve never seen before. From the person who gave the extra they had in their pocket to the corporation that contributed to a grant program, we saw an outpouring of support. Those donors helped our nonprofit partners continue their critical work on the front lines as they continued their fight for the causes closest to their hearts, such as gender equality, wildlife conservation, and human rights.

Their generosity added up to $105 million for vital work by our nonprofit partners in 2020—a goal that was once so enormous GlobalGiving staff referred to it as the BHAG: big, hairy, audacious goal. We saw that BHAG on a wall near our lobby nearly every day back when we worked from our office in Washington, D.C. When we started working from home in March, we thought we were a long way from the milestone. And we certainly didn’t think we would get there during a pandemic.

But that monumental number is not about us. It happened because of you.

Thank you for being the light in a long, dark year. Thank you for making it possible to reach new heights and keep going.

2021 started with another set of challenges and changes, but honestly, we’re hopeful for what’s ahead. We’re ready for another year with audacious goals that seem daunting—until they’re achieved.

The trials of 2020 came with tremendous growth. And lessons learned. And room for improvement. And new techniques and tools. And so many successes that remind us of why we believe in the principles of community-led change, Ethos, trust-based philanthropy, flexibility, and empathy.

The deluge of difficulties tested us. But we didn’t fail—at least not miserably or altogether (failure is part of our framework, after all). We reached milestones, set new records, and saw what we could accomplish in the face of the most serious challenges.

As we chisel away at the long-established status quo of aid, philanthropy, and disaster response, we’re seeing our ideas and efforts make an impact. That’s all the fuel that we need to keep moving toward bigger goals and greater influence for our 3,500+ partners around the globe.

We know a better world is possible, and we are set on creating it. All we need to move beyond GlobalGiving’s impact in 2020, is you.

With gratitude for your partnership,

Alix Guerrier

GlobalGiving CEO

• GlobalGiving_2020_Annual_Report.pdf (PDF)
  

Thanks to supporters like you, GlobalGiving is meeting its obligation to question the rules of traditional, top-down philanthropy, and change them for the better. In this update, we want to share with you a few notable initiatives from 2019 that made us proud.

We:

• Conducted research to understand and support community-led change—with the aim of making the nonprofit sector more accountable to the people it intends to serve.
• Led conversations among philanthropy platforms about ethical decision-making, called the Neutrality Paradox.
• Convened our corporate grantmaking community for the first time to foster peer learning and explore best practices in community-led giving.

Donations to the GlobalGiving Forward Fund support special initiatives like these, which are crucial to our mission to accelerate community-led change around the world. 

Please take a look at our full 2019 impact report to learn more about why your donations matter so much.

As always, thank you for your support.

Sincerely,

Alix Guerrier

GlobalGiving CEO

• GlobalGiving_2019_Annual_Report.pdf (PDF)