For nearly a decade, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy has helped donors collaborate and provided information about effective giving and other services to assist disaster-related philanthropy.
Regine Webster, who leads the grant-making and consulting teams for the center, talked with the Chronicle about how the coronavirus crisis is different from anything else the center has dealt with previously.
The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How would you compare the philanthropic response you have seen so far to the coronavirus outbreak with other disaster or epidemic events?
Our colleagues over at Candid have identified over $1 billion — with a “b” — in investment with coronavirus. There’s a number of huge South Korean companies that are really looking to stem the tide of coronavirus. When you think about what philanthropy has done historically, those are indeed unprecedented corporate contributions to this ongoing event.
Even when you think about Hurricane Harvey, we were only able to capture, again with Candid’s assistance, somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million in corporate contributions. So for this to be over $1 billion in assistance, for us, is pretty unbelievable.
What are some of the questions you have heard from donors and nonprofits about coronavirus response?
The questions that we’ve been fielding fall into five generic buckets.
First, individuals are calling on behalf of high-net-worth donors or institutional philanthropies seeking a better understanding the pandemic. What are the risks? What could be some of the more mathematical scenarios that are coming out of late?
Second, they want to understand how dollars have moved thus far — who’s giving, why they’re giving, what they’re giving for, what they’re giving, and to whom they’re giving.
Third, they want to understand our own response fund and how any dollars that we raise will be granted to support the various activities that are needed.
Fourth, people are seeking to understand the government’s role, and philanthropy’s role. If you’re not a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with multiple tens of millions of dollars to look at and address this pandemic, then what can smaller family foundations do to make a meaningful difference?
The last question we’re fielding has to do with place-based philanthropy. That’s where we’re talking to a lot of community foundations who care very deeply about their own community.
How has the rate of inquiries to your organization changed over the past couple of weeks?
We’re only midway through March, but it has already been an incredibly active year, from the Australian bush fires, earthquakes in Puerto Rico, and now the coronavirus. Normally, we here at the Center for Disaster Philanthropy see some blue-sky times in January and February. But we’ve seen an unprecedented number of disasters and an unprecedented spike in the queries that are coming our way.
We do a fair number of webinars, but the webinar that we hosted last week on the coronavirus — we’ve never had that many individuals on a webinar in our nine-and-a-half-year existence. It was crazy.
