Joining Forces to Fight Poverty

International aid group forges partnership with a New York charity in a bid to engage more youth

Mercy Corps, an international aid and development organization in Portland, Ore., has joined forces with NetAid, a New York charity that engages young people as activists to raise awareness about global poverty and health concerns.

The merger, one of several Mercy Corps has engineered in its 28-year history, represents a significant step in the organization’s new efforts to educate Americans about issues facing the developing world.

“For us to really succeed on a global scale, we have to change people’s minds in the United States,” says Matthew De Galan, senior vice president for resource development and communications at Mercy Corps. “We have to build a stronger constituency of people who care about our issues, and we think that the best way to do that is with young people.”

The realization that the group needs to focus more on education came both from Mercy Corps’s leadership and from employees working overseas, says Mr. De Galan. Many times, he says, when he has visited projects in developing countries, staff members from those countries have asked him what Mercy Corps is doing to educate people in the United States about the realities of life in the developing world.

“That drumbeat of questions we would get from people on our own staff, project managers in Jordan or Sudan or Mongolia, was at least as important as our own sort of calculation and analysis that this was something we needed to get involved with,” says Mr. De Galan.

In addition to the merger, Mercy Corps has won a $1.2-million grant and free space in Manhattan from the Battery Park City Authority to design and run a World Hunger Education Center, which is scheduled to open next year. The organization has also taken over operation of the Film Connection, a free lending library of socially conscious movies and documentaries on DVD that film groups can borrow to spark discussion.

Searching for a Partner

At the same time that Mercy Corps was starting to seek new ways to educate and engage young people on the issue of global poverty, NetAid was looking for a way to broaden its reach.

NetAid’s flagship program, the Global Citizen Corps, provides intensive training to 200 high-school students each year to teach them how to educate their peers and get them involved in global-poverty and health issues.

Last May, NetAid’s board of directors began looking for organizations that would be able to help the group reach more young people without building a whole new network itself.

Kimberly A. Hamilton, NetAid’s president, says the organization explored a number of different options. NetAid spoke with relief and development organizations, like Mercy Corps, charities that work with college students, and exchange programs. It also looked at the possibility of bringing together a lot of small organizations that work with young people under one umbrella.

In the end, she says, NetAid was impressed by the commitment Mercy Corps had shown to education through the hunger center, and decided on a partnership with the group because of the compatibility of the two charities’ goals.

“They were looking for really good youth programs, which we had, and we were looking for a broader audience, which they had,” says Ms. Hamilton.

The two groups are working on ways to integrate Mercy Corps’s aid and development work into the Global Citizen Corps program. An obvious first step, says Mr. De Galan, is to recruit its staff members around the world to brief the students during regularly scheduled conference calls. For example, he says, the organization’s director in Kenya could give them an update on the refugee crisis that country faces as people flee fighting in neighboring Somalia.

With such updates, says Ms. Hamilton, the issues the students are learning about “become much less hypothetical.”

A Growing Trend

After leading the merger process and seeing it to completion, Ms. Hamilton plans to step down from her position at the end of the month. She plans to do consulting work for NetAid and spend time with her husband, who lives in Indonesia. Mr. De Galan, of Mercy Corps, says that other personnel changes aren’t expected as a result of the merger.

Alfred Wise, president of Community Wealth Ventures, a management consulting company in Washington, worked with NetAid to help the organization evaluate charities it wanted to collaborate with and later helped with the merger negotiations. He says that more nonprofit organizations are showing an interest in mergers.

“Unfortunately many are doing it way too late, when they’re at a point of desperation, and then it’s challenging,” says Mr. Wise. “A merger out of desperation is a tough way to go.”

By contrast, he says, NetAid’s decision to merge with Mercy Corps shows how mergers can be a tool to help an organization expand its reach.

“In conference rooms across the country, people are thinking about how they can do more with less,” says Mr. Wise. “This is a great example of an organization that didn’t just look at the walls of the conference room and think that was the limit of what they could do, but started to look to partners to accelerate.”

A History of Mergers

Mercy Corps has grown quickly over the past decade. It currently operates with a $200-million annual budget, up from $30-million 10 years ago.

Mergers have played a role in that growth. In the mid-1990s, the charity merged with Scottish European Aid to form Mercy Corps Scotland. The plan, says Mr. De Galan, was for Mercy Corps to gain greater access to funding from the European Union and other grant makers. He estimates that that decision accounts for at least $15-million a year.

Other mergers, says Mr. De Galan, such as its 2004 alliance with the Conflict Management Group, in Cambridge, Mass., were designed to add new skills to Mercy Corps’s repertoire and are more difficult to quantify.

“This merger is different, because it does bring a significant new arena of work for Mercy Corps, reaching out to young people in the United States,” he says. “It’ll be interesting to see how our donors react to that, if they think that’s a good idea.”

Being clear to donors that the new education efforts will not be paid for with gifts made to support the group’s humanitarian work will be critical, says Mr. De Galan.

Even though NetAid’s emphasis on reaching out to young people represents a new area for Mercy Corps, he believes the lessons the organization has learned from past mergers will serve it well. The keys, says Mr. De Galan, are making sure that representatives of each group work together, and that they regularly meet to identify potential problems.

Mercy Corps, he says, is just starting the nitty-gritty, unglamorous work of knitting the two organizations into one.

“If this were a marathon, we’re probably only on the second mile so far,” says Mr. De Galan. “It’s relatively easy to get together, sign an agreement, announce the merger, and feel excited about it. But there’s just a lot of work that has to go on after that.”