Grant Makers Move Swiftly

Giving by private, corporate, and community foundations tops $150-million in cash and supplies

The nation’s foundations and corporations have been scrambling to figure out how best to help the victims of last month’s

tsunamis in South Asia.

Many foundations, like millions of individual Americans, have moved quickly to get money to organizations working to meet the region’s emergency needs. Other foundations are hanging back, assessing the situation and how they might help.

Companies and their grant-making foundations were among the first to pledge their support to the relief effort — a reflection, at least in part, of their own global business interests, corporate-giving experts say.

At the same time, many community foundations, which are designed largely to raise and distribute charitable dollars in their local areas, also jumped in, setting up special disaster funds or otherwise encouraging donors to give to relief efforts.

While no official count has been made, foundations of all types — private, corporate, and community — have pledged more than $150-million in cash, products, and services to the crisis, and more is likely in the days and months ahead.

Topping the list of corporate donors were Pfizer, in New York, with $10-million in cash and $25-million worth of pharmaceuticals, and the Coca-Cola Company, in Atlanta, with $10-million.

Businesses also contributed in many other ways: Amazon.com and Yahoo set up a way for people on their sites to give directly to the American Red Cross, while several credit-card companies waived fees they typically charge charities for gifts they received.

Among the largest awards made by private foundations were $3-million each from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, in Austin, Tex., and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle. Their money went to support numerous relief operations.

Devising Strategies

Some of America’s biggest donors to overseas causes are still mapping their strategies for long-term assistance to the region. The Rockefeller Foundation, which contributes to South Asian organizations from its Bangkok office, says it won’t finish planning its response until the end of the month. And many smaller foundations, worried that the size of the gifts they could make might not add much to the relief efforts, also are waiting to see where they can make a difference.

The South Asia crisis and the unprecedented charitable response will probably lead to an overall increase in overseas giving this year. International grants by American foundations totaled an estimated $3-billion in 2003, according to the latest figures available from the Foundation Center, a research group in New York, and the Council on Foundations, a Washington association.

The increase is expected despite U.S. Treasury Department guidelines, which have caused some dismay among grant makers, designed to keep nonprofit groups from unwittingly helping terrorists. The guidelines encourage grant makers to carefully vet grant recipients that do work abroad to make sure their money is used for legitimate purposes.

John Harvey, executive director of Grantmakers Without Borders, a coalition of international donors, says this crisis illustrates the potentially detrimental impact of rules that would, among other things, require grant makers to check the names of recipient organizations against government lists of problem groups.

“You can’t tie the hands of international organizations that are reacting to an emergency situation,” he says. “It would be absurd to have to list-check at a time like this.”

Short Term vs. Long Term

In response to the tsunamis, some foundations have split their gifts to respond to both the short- and long-term needs.

A week after the disaster, the Carnegie Corporation of New York pledged $1-million to the relief efforts. A week later, the foundation said it had decided to give half the money to groups working on relief and rescue and half to Unicef to support the long-term education needs of children in the area.

The Citigroup Foundation, the financial company’s charitable arm, made a $3-million pledge just three days after the disaster, giving $1-million to the American Red Cross for its emergency work; dedicating another $1-million to local nonprofit groups in the affected countries; and setting aside the other $1-million for rebuilding efforts.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation split its gift, too, but for different reasons. The foundation contributed $1.5-million to CARE International, directing the group to use some of the money for disaster relief and reconstruction in South Asia and some of it for work in the Darfur region of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“We said to ourselves that there was some danger that the natural disaster in South Asia would deflect attention from an also severe humanitarian situation caused by human conflict in Africa,” says Jonathan F. Fanton, MacArthur’s president.

With few exceptions, private foundations that are giving to tsunami-related efforts say they are doing so without cutting into their giving plans for this year.

Pew Charitable Trusts, for example, gave $1-million to the American Red Cross from a fund set aside for what its president, Rebecca W. Rimel, calls “special needs and opportunities.”

She says that while an overseas gift for disaster relief is outside her organization’s regular scope of priorities, it is true to Pew’s legacy. The group’s first donation, in 1948, went to the American Red Cross to assist flood victims in Pennsylvania.

At less than five years old, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, in San Francisco, doesn’t have much of a legacy yet, and while it does give overseas — mostly for environmental and conservation efforts in South America — it has no experience in Asia. For that reason, officials say, the foundation decided the best thing it could do was match gifts of its employees.

Through the end of March, the foundation will match five-to-one, up from its typical two-to-one match, any gift made by a staff member to a tsunami-related cause. In this way, the foundation, with about 80 employees, says it will donate up to $1-million.

Community Funds

The disaster has some community foundations, which generally give in limited geographical areas, looking abroad, too.

The California Community Foundation, which last pulled from its discretionary funds to provide disaster relief after wildfires ripped through the southern part of the state in 2003, gave $20,000 to relief groups working in South Asia. Together with its donors, the foundation has contributed more than $400,000 to the efforts.

The San Francisco Foundation has so far collected $66,000 in its Tsunami Recovery Fund, and it plans to contribute the money in the coming months to groups working on efforts beyond immediate rescue and relief.

Without much experience in overseas grant making, says Sandra Hernández, the community foundation’s chief executive officer, the organization will rely on help from some of the charities it already supports, such as the Global Fund for Women, and from its own trustees and donors who have experience with nonprofit groups working abroad.

The Akron Community Foundation has raised about $213,000 that will go directly to the American Red Cross and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

The foundation collected the money through a partnership it created with a regional bank chain and the city’s newspaper to encourage people to give to the relief effort.

The three groups first came together after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, raising money to buy new vehicles for the New York City Fire Department.

“We built on our 9/11 experience to make this happen,” says Jody Bacon, president of the Akron Community Foundation.

Ani Hurwitz, a spokeswoman at the New York Community Trust, which was instrumental in the relief efforts after September 11, says her group has decided to sit this one out.

“We feel our expertise is local,” says Ms. Hurwitz. “We’ll watch for what the effects may be — we do have large South Asian communities here — but we don’t know what they might be at this time.”

Barry D. Gaberman, senior vice president at the Ford Foundation, says his foundation is watching, too, taking time to shape its response to the disaster. That doesn’t mean Ford money hasn’t helped so far.

The foundation, which usually gives about $35-million a year through its offices in Hanoi, Vietnam; Jakarta, Indonesia; and New Delhi, contacted the local nonprofit groups it supports immediately after the disaster to tell them they could use Ford grant money already in hand any way they saw fit.

In the meantime, Mr. Gaberman says, the foundation has been assessing through its staff members and its contacts with groups in the area what the critical needs will be after the emergencies are over.

Ford is establishing a new fund of between $5-million and $10-million that Mr. Gaberman says will go to assist such efforts as rebuilding small businesses, providing counseling to people in areas hit by the tsunamis, or ensuring that local charities have money to hire enough staff members to handle their added burdens.

“Our resources are best used in ways not likely to be covered in the first response,” he says. “It’s much more appropriate for us to be looking at economic-development issues than buying blankets.”

Nicole Wallace contributed to this article.