Doctors Without Borders Asks Donors to Give to General Emergency Fund

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders has treated more than 1,000 earthquake victims in Haiti. Julie Remy

January 15, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute

Doctors Without Borders is now asking donors to make contributions to its general Emergency Relief Fund, rather than specifically for Haiti relief efforts.

“Our immediate response in the first hours following the disaster in Haiti was only possible because of private unrestricted donations from around the world received before the earthquake struck,” the organization wrote in a statement on its donation page.

The group adds: “These types of funds ensure that our medical teams can react to the Haiti emergency and humanitarian crises all over the world, particularly neglected crises that remain outside the media spotlight.”

The move mirrors a decision Doctors Without Borders made a week after the Asian tsunami in 2004 when the organization announced that the organization had raised as much money as it could use for its operations in South Asia.

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NICOLE WALLACE

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.