Puerto Rico & Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fund

Four years ago, Hurricane Maria made landfall in southeastern Puerto Rico as a devastating Category 4 hurricane before cutting across the entire island. It killed at least 3,000 people, destroyed and damaged hundreds of thousands of homes, and left communities across the island without power for nearly a year. It also caused immense damage to other islands in the Caribbean like Dominica and St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

But even years later, the storm is not a distant memory for those who lost loved ones, homes, and livelihoods—its impacts continue to shape daily life. It’s important to remember that Hurricane Maria and its destruction did not happen in isolation. It came swiftly on the heels of the powerful Hurricane Irma. And in Puerto Rico, the storm’s impacts compounded a dire economic crisis and injustices rooted in colonial legacies and the island’s political status as an unincorporated U.S. territory. Now, the pandemic and recent earthquakes pose even more challenges to the ongoing recovery.

Since the 2017 launch of our Puerto Rico & Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fund, you and more than 50,000 people and companies joined in solidarity to collectively raise $12.4 million to support immediate relief and long-term recovery and resilience in the Caribbean.

The GlobalGiving team is incredibly proud of what we, in close partnership with community leaders and local, trusted nonprofit partners in the Caribbean, have accomplished since 2017. As we now close our fund, I’d like to share 10 highlights that are a direct result of your generosity:

• We awarded 152 grants over the past four years to 65 vetted, local nonprofits serving communities in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Our initial grants funded critical emergency relief, such as providing food, safe drinking water, and fuel. As months and years passed, we doubled down on our commitment to providing long-term funding to community-led organizations driving disaster recovery and resilience to future disasters.

• We established an important partnership with Cruzan Rum to power its Island Spirit Fund. This fund has raised an additional $4 million for long-term hurricane recovery in the Caribbean. Many of the GlobalGiving partners that continue to benefit from the Island Spirit Fund, like Protectores de Cuencas and La Maraña, also received funding from the Puerto Rico & Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fund. The partnership is a prime example of how our corporate partners are a vital part of our disaster response work.

• As the pandemic swept across the world in early 2020, we recognized that so many of our nonprofit partners on the front lines of disaster recovery were relying on GlobalGiving to step up. We not only launched a Coronavirus Relief Fund, but we also activated rapid response donations from other active disaster funds to support existing partners who found themselves integrating pandemic response with their ongoing recovery efforts. Through the Puerto Rico & Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fund, we rapidly provided more than $300,000 to 10 partners in Puerto Rico to ensure that communities most vulnerable to the pandemic (like families of children with disabilities) had access to food, water, hygiene kits, protective personal equipment (PPE), and other necessities. These rapid response donations did not require burdensome grant proposals or formal reporting. Instead, we trusted our partners to immediately use the funds to support the community members they serve every day.

• The Puerto Rico Community Foundation has led an island-wide initiative to establish a Community Aqueduct Network. After the hurricane, access to clean drinking water remained a huge challenge for too many communities. There are more than 250 community aqueducts across Puerto Rico that serve hundreds of thousands of people. With GlobalGiving’s support, the foundation has provided grants, training, and targeted technical assistance to more than 30 community groups to ensure local, participatory governance of the aqueducts in their communities. In January 2021, we celebrated when it was announced that the foundation was awarded $25 million in government funding to advance this important initiative.

• Women have been at the forefront of hurricane recovery in Puerto Rico. It follows then that investing in women makes entire communities more resilient to future disasters. Taller Salud, a community-based feminist organization founded 40 years ago and based in Loíza, Puerto Rico, is doing just that. It's dedicated to improving women’s access to health care, reducing violence within the community, and encouraging economic growth through education and activism. After Hurricane Maria, more than 3,000 families in their community lost their homes. With funds from GlobalGiving, the organization has helped nearly two dozen women rebuild and repair their homes. 

• Unfortunately, the arts and culture sector is often heavily underfunded and neglected after disasters, even though artists and artisans are at the center of disaster recovery. Since 2017, our partners at Craft Emergency Relief Fund (CERF+) have supported 396 artists in Puerto Rico with nearly $700,000 in grant assistance and donated equipment. The organization has played an important role in getting aid to artists in rural areas with limited access to information about how to receive support from legitimate sources. Similarly, our partners at Y No Había Luz have focused on the power of artistic experiences to drive social change in Puerto Rico. Through art and theater, including puppetry and immersive storytelling, the organization has provided a space for communities to identify common issues and design solutions in a participatory way alongside their neighbors.

• GlobalGiving staff traveled to Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean multiple times over the past four years to meet directly with our nonprofits partners, grow our long-term relationships with them, and see what they have been able to accomplish thanks to your donation. That also allowed our team to share more incredible stories about their work, like the story of Programa De Educación Comunal De Entrega Y Servicio (P.E.C.E.S.). Based in Punta Santiago, a coastal town in Puerto Rico hit hard by Hurricane Maria, the organization’s Community Sustainability Center became its base for all hurricane relief and recovery work from the day the storm made landfall. They’ve stood by their community ever since—from rebuilding homes to feeding elderly individuals who live alone. With funding from GlobalGiving, P.E.C.E.S.’ center is now at the core of the organization’s critical community development work.

• Our partners at Nuestra Escuela are a powerful force for good. Led by Ana Yris Guzmán Torres, the organization has spent the past four years reconstructing and remodeling its school facilities in Caguas, Puerto Rico that were damaged during the storm. It is also nearing completion on its new solar-powered community first response center at the school that will serve students, their families, and all community members when the next disaster hits. Nuestra Escuela and its community are more equipped to face the future because of you.

• Trusting local organizations to know what is best for their communities is at the core of GlobalGiving’s disaster response work. That is why we have been big supporters of Filantropía Puerto Rico and its FORWARD Puerto Rico Fund. The organization is now in the final stages of a highly participatory process to award the final grants from its fund. In St. Croix, we have also developed a key partnership with the St. Croix Foundation for Community Development to advance a just, participatory, and equitable recovery across the U.S. Virgin Islands.

• We have been fortunate to form lifelong bonds with community leaders in the Caribbean. We have learned from—and been inspired by—their amazing commitment to their communities and a just recovery. GlobalGiving has also forged deeper relationships with anchor organizations in the Caribbean. That is especially critical for the future as the climate crisis causes more frequent and more powerful hurricanes. When the next hurricane strikes in the Caribbean, our nonprofit partners can trust that GlobalGiving will be there to work alongside them every step of the way.

Though we are closing this fund, these trusted nonprofit partners in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean remain hard at work. They need your support to continue the long journey to full recovery, especially given the compounding effects of the pandemic. We encourage you to explore our partners’ profiles linked above and, if you are able, consider making a donation to fuel their critical work.

From everyone at GlobalGiving, thank you for joining us to fuel community-led disaster recovery in the Caribbean.

With immense gratitude, 

Chase + the GlobalGiving Team

P.S. We invite you to learn even more here about the amazing GlobalGiving nonprofit partners driving hurricane recovery in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean in a special report in our Learn Library.

The devastation of Hurricane Maria revealed the longstanding and historical traumas faced by many Puerto Rican communities. Now the pandemic and its complex web of impacts have further built upon and exacerbated these traumas. A critical question has emerged: What does a just recovery mean for Puerto Rico?

Your donation to the Puerto Rico & Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fund has ensured that our incredible nonprofit partners across Puerto Rico are able to help answer this question through their critical work in service of communities across the island every single day.

Here’s a brief look at how your donation has helped one of our key partners, Mentes Puertorriqueñas en Acción (MPA), contribute its own unique answer to this important question.

For the past 10 years, MPA has been at the forefront of inspiring the next generation of citizen leaders to transform Puerto Rico. The MPA team works directly with college students and young professionals to provide them with the skills and connections they need to advance social causes that build a fair, just, and participatory society.

MPA’s flagship program is called the Program for the Empowerment and Retention of Agents of Change (PARACa). Through PARACa, their team provides intensive training every year to a cohort of about 20 youth leaders and places these new leaders in internships with community-based organizations driving social change across Puerto Rico.

After Hurricane Maria, MPA adapted the program to have the youth leaders focus on relief and recovery efforts. This contributed to the long-term resilience of impacted communities and tackled systemic issues that amplified the outsized impacts of the hurricane.

The pandemic caused MPA to make significant changes to the structure of the program, but the organization maintained its core promise of preparing more than 20 young Puerto Rican leaders (even though Zoom!) to excel in the social impact sector. Thanks to your support, GlobalGiving was able to invest in the success of MPA’s 2020 PARACa program and, by extension, in the next generation of citizen leaders in Puerto Rico. Your donation helped shape the answer of what a just recovery looks like in practice: providing the opportunity for Puerto Rican youth to chart a course for their own self-defined, locally-relevant recovery.

Imagining and achieving a just recovery for Puerto Rico will continue to require many unique approaches, voices, and perspectives. Thank you for joining with GlobalGiving and MPA to continue pushing towards that just recovery.

As we’ve done over the last three years, GlobalGiving will continue to keep you updated in the months ahead about how your generosity and support have powered community-led disaster recovery in Puerto Rico.

Be safe and well.

With gratitude,
Chase + the GlobalGiving Team

It’s hard to believe that three years have already passed since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean. In Puerto Rico, the trauma and damage inflicted by the storm remain present to this day. 

We must remember that Hurricane Maria was the deadliest disaster in the United States in 100 years. It tragically left at least 3,000 people dead and the entire island without full power for nearly an entire year. The storm’s impacts not only built upon years of economic and political marginalization of the Puerto Rican people, but it also weakened local communities’ ability to respond to other massive crises thrown their way this year—like the earthquakes that struck the island earlier this year and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The reality is that the nonprofit sector in Puerto Rico and its leaders like Ana Yris Guzmán have been, and continue to be, at the forefront of recovery efforts on the island. Both federal and local government agencies have sadly failed to deliver on promised disaster aid.

In the immediate aftermath of the storm and the years that followed, you chose to join with more than 50,000 others to support GlobalGiving’s Puerto Rico & Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fund. As a result of your donation, our trusted nonprofit partners based in Puerto Rico have been able to rely on GlobalGiving’s long-term support to further their critical work. Here is a snapshot of how your donation continues to help communities across Puerto Rico on their journey to recovery:

• Y No Había Luz centers its work on the power of artistic experiences to drive social change in Puerto Rico. It recently launched its Centinelas del Corazón program to serve multiple communities across the island that were hit the hardest by Hurricane Maria. The program aims to strengthen social ties in impacted communities through art and theater, including puppetry and immersive storytelling. Through workshops (virtual until further notice) and community dialogues, the Centinelas del Corazón program will provide a space for communities to identify common issues and to design solutions in a participatory way alongside their neighbors.

• Programa de Educación Comunal de Entrega y Servicio (P.E.C.E.S.) has been serving vulnerable communities across Puerto Rico since 1985 through its programs promoting education, at-risk youth intervention, and community development. The organization’s Community Sustainability Center, based in Punta Santiago very close to where Hurricane Maria first made landfall, has quickly adapted all of its programmings amid the pandemic and is now providing non-stop supportive services virtually, including counseling and other social work services. P.E.C.E.S. is also providing holistic support, such as hot meal distribution, to the elderly who were disproportionately impacted by the storm and are now at greatest risk to COVID-19.

• Intercambios Puerto Rico is a community-based organization that promotes the social integration of marginalized groups, including people with substance abuse disorders, people experiencing homelessness, and sex workers. These groups, who are already struggling from the disproportionate impacts of Hurricane Maria, now find themselves in an even more precarious position due to the realities of the pandemic. The organization has been running its mobile services to provide on-the-spot counseling, COVID-19 safety items like masks and hand sanitizer, and information about how to protect yourself from the virus.

Thank you for your generosity and support of community-led disaster recovery. Please expect another update from GlobalGiving early next year about how your donation makes a difference in the lives of so many.

With gratitude, 

Chase + the GlobalGiving Team

In the face of so many overwhelming challenges—from COVID-19 to recent earthquakes—communities across Puerto Rico continue to show extraordinary courage and determination. Now, on top of these challenges, the impacts of Hurricane Isaias as it passed Puerto Rico in recent days serve as a stark reminder of the precarious position of the island as we continue into this year’s hurricane season. Each additional disaster event further complicates the already daunting journey to recovery that communities continue to face long after Hurricane Maria struck nearly three years ago. 

Thanks to your support of our Puerto Rico & Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fund, GlobalGiving has recently activated additional emergency donations in support of our trusted nonprofit partners on the frontlines. Now more than ever, our partners are providing critical services to community members most in need, combating misinformation, and standing in solidarity with those who have lost their homes, livelihoods, and/or family members during this devastating time. 

Here is a brief snapshot of how your generosity is making a difference right now in communities across Puerto Rico during this time of crisis:

• Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico is ensuring that every individual impacted by disaster has access to justice, the right to housing, and the fair recovery of their communities. While the organization continues to provide pro-bono legal services to communities impacted by Hurricane Maria and the recent earthquakes, it is also ensuring that all communities on the island have a reliable source of information they can access about key topics like COVID-19 and employment, elder rights, domestic violence, displacement, and housing. To do this, the organization is constantly managing and updating its knowledge platform that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people in recent weeks.
  
  
• La Fondita de Jesús remains committed to serving individuals experiencing homelessness in the greater San Juan area. As the COVID-19 crisis rages on, community members experiencing homelessness (many as a result of Hurricane Maria’s long-term impacts) are especially at risk of infection by the virus because they lack reliable, safe shelter. Each day, the organization is preparing and delivering hundreds of hot meals, especially in support of elderly constituents. The organization is also providing remote assistance to its community members in its permanent housing programs through on-staff social workers, substance abuse counselors, and psychologists.
  
  
• Proyecto La Nueva Esperanza continues its dedicated mission to supporting low-income, isolated elders in rural communities in northwest Puerto Rico. The organization is actively providing holistic support to 50 elders in the form of grocery delivery, safe cleaning supplies, accurate information, and best practices to remain safe from the virus. 

Thank you for choosing to support community-led disaster recovery efforts. We will have more updates to share about the impacts of your generosity in the coming months. 

Please stay safe and well.

With gratitude,

Chase + the GlobalGiving team

GlobalGiving is working around the clock during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis to best serve all of our nonprofit partners across 170 countries. We have launched a Coronavirus Relief Fund, piloted a Hardship Microgrant Initiative, and doubled down on trusting our partners to know what is best for their communities during this emergency.

The COVID-19 crisis is not only upending our own lives and the lives of our loved ones, but it is also disproportionately hurting the most vulnerable among us and in communities around the world. This reality is especially true for communities that have already been severely affected by recent disasters, like Hurricane Maria, and now find themselves on an even more complex and daunting journey to recovery.

We stand in solidarity with all of our nonprofit partners in Puerto Rico that are now grappling with the devastating impacts of COVID-19 on top of the traumas of Hurricane Maria and the recent earthquakes that struck the island in January. Before the massive spread of the coronavirus, myself and other members of GlobalGiving’s Disaster Recovery Network team were fortunate to visit many of our partners on the island in February. I want to take a moment to briefly share some of the incredible work that you and more than 50,000 others have supported through your donation to the Puerto Rico & Caribbean Hurricane Relief Fund.

• La Maraña is a grassroots, women-led organization that formed in response to the destruction brought by Hurricane Maria. Through its participatory design methods, it promotes the inclusion and empowerment of local Puerto Rican voices in the design and recovery process. For the last two and a half years, the organization has been deeply connected with three communities in Humacao, Carolina, and Comerío. Putting community members’ voices in the lead, La Maraña collaboratively designs community-driven master plans and implements a commonly elected social impact project in each respective community. Our team was able to see firsthand the important work completed by the San Antón and Saint Just community in Carolina to transform an abandoned school into a community hub that offers alternative schooling, small-business development, and sustainable agriculture. You can learn more about the organization’s keen focus on incorporating community feedback through this recent video profile.
  
  
• La Fondita de Jesús has served vulnerable individuals experiencing homelessness across the greater San Juan area since the 1980s. With GlobalGiving support, the organization was able to fully install solar power systems on the majority of its buildings in San Juan. Each of these buildings serves a core need for the organization’s constituents, from long-term housing to basic services like reliable meals and showers. Our team had the opportunity to see each of these power systems in place and being put to immediate use. This is a key step for La Fondita de Jesús towards resiliency, especially when you consider the nearly year-long power outage across Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
  
  
• Taller Salud is a community-based feminist organization dedicated to improving women’s access to health care, reducing violence within the community, and encouraging economic growth through education and activism. For the last 40 years, the organization has been directly serving communities in Loíza. Since Hurricane Maria, Taller Salud has been successfully advancing a Just Recovery Campaign related to affordable housing and gender and racial justice—issues that are at the core of an equitable recovery on the island. We had the opportunity to sit down with the organization’s leadership for an open discussion about the trajectory of Puerto Rico’s recovery process and to identify future opportunities for partnership.

We will be back in your inbox in the coming months with more stories of hope and recovery in the midst of so many challenges. From our nonprofit partners and everyone at GlobalGiving, thank you for your incredible generosity. Your choice to support community-led recovery efforts in the Caribbean makes all the difference during this difficult time.

Please stay safe and well—and let’s all look out for each other and our communities.

With gratitude,

Chase + the GlobalGiving team